Political Demography
The newly-released North American Jewish Data Bank's 2010 World Jewish Population Report, edited by professors Sergio DellaPergola, Arnold Dashefsky and Ira Sheskin has been making waves. Critics on the right are charging that in claiming a non-Jewish majority exists between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the report is slanted and unduly pessimistic. Critics on the left in the Diaspora will complain that the authors were too "old school" in defining what Jewish means.
There are, says the report, about 13 million Jews in the world with the largest concentration (5.7 million), as determined by Orthodox standards of religious law, living in Israel. Of the Diaspora's 7.7 million, most (5,275,000) "core" Jews -- meaning people who identify themselves as Jews, or who are identified as Jews by those they residing with, and who have no other monotheistic religion -- live in the United States. Eighty-two percent of all Jews live in either Israel or the America. Other countries with 100,000 or more Jews are France (483,500), Canada (375,000), United Kingdom (292,000), Russian Federation, (205,000), Argentina (182,300), Germany (119,000) and Australia (107,500).
With the singular exception of Israel, Jewish fertility continued to be low, the population continued to age, intermarriage continued to increase, and relatively few children of intermarried couples were being raised as Jews, according to DellaPergola. Consider, too, that roughly 42% of all recently married Jews outside of Israel have married out.
Zionists take satisfaction that Israel is not only the center of Jewish civilization but has become home to the world's largest Jewish population. Israel’s 5,703,700 Jews when combined with 312,800 halakhically non-Jewish members of Jewish households (mostly from the former Soviet Union) forms a combined population of 6 million. More Jews now live in Greater Tel Aviv than in Metro New York.
What worries many Zionists however is Israel's shrinking Jewish majority. The number of Arabs in pre-1967 Israel is 1,238,000. The combined Jewish and Arab population in sovereign Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza is 11,222,100 leaving the total core Jewish population between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River at just 50.8%; 49.8% counting 222,000 foreign workers. If the non-halakhically Jewish population is counted, the Jewish percentage climbs to 53.6 of the total in Israel and the territories; 58.5% after subtracting Gaza.
No matter how the data is juggled, insists DellaPergola, "The Jewish majority is constantly decreasing — if extant at all — over the whole territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and more particularly within the State of Israel."
DellaPergola has been challenged in the past for taking census numbers from the Palestinian Authority at face value. He has strongly defended the integrity of his data, though in this report DellaPergola appears to acknowledge that Palestinian figures had originally been "overestimated." Nevertheless, he concludes that the Palestinian Arab population in January 2010 stood at 3,670,000 about 2,200,000 in Judea and Samaria and 1,470,000 in Gaza. At the same time, he acknowledges that the Arab birthrate inside Israel proper and in the West Bank is slowly decreasing.
To complicate matters, not all of the halakhically Jewish numbers can necessarily be counted on by the Zionist enterprise. The ultra-Orthodox comprise about 8.5 percent of Israel's total population and are projected to grow to 17.5 percent within two decades. By 2020, 60% of Israeli youths eligible to serve in the IDF will be sitting on the sidelines because of draft exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox youth.
Population surveys are intrinsically political documents. Experts with agendas will clash over methodology, data collection, definitions and interpretation. Diaspora liberals will lobby for a more "inclusive" criteria in defining Jews and a rosier interpretation of the Jewish predicament. DellaPergola admits that the U.S. Jewish population would jump to at least 6.7 million if the non-halachic criteria for defining Jews under Israel's Law of Return were applied in the American setting. Dismissing evidence to the contrary as tendentious, DellaPergola's Israeli critics and their American allies will argue that talk of Arabs outnumbering Jews is alarmist, that in any case, Israel's political system can be tweaked so that even an outsized Arab minority would be neither disenfranchised nor dominant.
On one point there is no dispute: DellaPergola's figures generate such visceral reactions because at stake is nothing less than Jewish continuity in the Diaspora and sovereignty in Israel.
Islam and Interfaith Relations
Old-fashioned anti-Semitism needs to be factored into the equation if Westerners are to comprehend the zero-sum nature of the Arab-Israel conflict. But the good news out of an ecumenical conclave held in the House of Lords [November 23] by the Children of Abraham organization and a British affiliate of Cairo's Al Azhar University is that a long-standing ban on Muslim-Jewish interfaith relations has been lifted. The fly in the ointment is that the decision did not explicitly mention Judaism by name. A spokesman for London-based Grand Mufti Sheikh Fawzi Al-Zifzaf, who drafted the ruling, explained that "the people who have taken the document forward have done so at great risk." No doubt.
A recent BBC Panorama program revealed that even today certain Muslim parochial schools providing part-time instruction to 5,000 children at 40 different locations in the UK have been using a curriculum of hate supplied by Saudi Arabia that among other things refer to Jews as looking like "monkeys and pigs." Pupils are further taught that Jews seek world domination. The Saudi ambassador in the U.S. reportedly told a Children of Abraham official that the texts did not truly represent the values of his country. Of course, youngsters educated outside the West, especially in fanatical Islamist regimes, are at even greater risk of being inculcated into the oldest hatred.
Speaking on his movement's Gaza-based television station recently [November 5] senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar offered viewers a twisted capsule history of the Jews from Pharaonic times to medieval Europe in order to demonstrate that anti-Semitism was the fault of the Jews themselves. Jews have faced a series of expulsions Zahar lectured, for sucking the blood of, and stealing from, non-Jews. One day, he declared, the Jews would be expelled "from the entire territory of Palestine, Allah willing." He cited the Koran as justifying the murder of Jews and to reiterate a recurring genocidal theme, developed in his [2008] book, that the Jewish people had “no future between nations." There is no place for Jews anywhere in the Middle East, he said. "You are about to disappear." As a founding leader of Hamas and its former foreign minister, Zahar is merely mirroring the visceral Jew-hatred manifested in the movement's 1988 charter.
Plainly, Hamas's problem with a Jewish state is not rooted in politics, but in religious chauvinism. In more genteel form the comparatively moderate Palestinian camp headed by Mahmoud Abbas is no less invested in invalidating Jewish rights. Take a new study carried out on behalf of the Palestinian Authority which found that Jewish people have no authentic connection to the Western Wall. That makes Jews interlopers in the Mideast. No wonder that a recent poll conducted for The Israel Project found sixty percent of Palestinian Arabs felt that a "two state solution" should be a precursor to the phased destruction of Israel. A Pew survey earlier this year found more than 90% of Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Palestinians held hateful views toward Jews, while even 74% of non-Arab Muslims in Indonesia were hostile. Antagonism toward Jews is so widespread that one London newspaper eulogized Al-Azhar's Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi who died in March, for his moderation – he had denounced the 9/11 attacks -- his description of Jews as "enemies of Allah" and "descendants of apes and pigs" notwithstanding.
Apologists for Muslim anti-Semitism argue that Islamic attitudes toward Jews had been benign even tolerant until the establishment of modern Israel – the Zionists' "original sin." In fact, the Jewish condition under Muslim rule ranged from one of peaceful inferiority to that of persecution and humiliation, in the assessment of Bernard Lewis's The Jews of Islam. Martin Gilbert has recently provided fresh historical evidence for Lewis's appraisal. Islamic civilization assigned Jews an institutionally inferior societal place as dhimmis and the Koran makes a number of disparaging references to Jews (though also a few positive ones).
It would be comforting to think that contemporary Muslim civilization is at least grappling with how to relate to Jews outside the framework of dhimmitude. If only the laudable, albeit, faint efforts of a relatively unknown Grand Mufti in Britain to explore a new relationship were not held in contempt by Islam's more influential holy men such as Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi whose broadcast on Al Jazeera, reach 40 million believers worldwide and who takes pride in boycotting interfaith conferences with Jews.
###
Referendum for Peace
Britons will be holding a national referendum early next year on electoral reform. The Arab League is supporting a referendum in war torn Sudan over independence for the south. When the Turkish parliament failed to amend the constitution by a sufficient majority the nation held a referendum in September to do so. And while the United States does not hold national referendums state "propositions" are not uncommon.
Yet the 65-33 vote in Israel's Knesset [on Monday, November 24] to require a referendum before ceding east Jerusalem, the Golan Heights or any other part of sovereign Israel should a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority or Syria be struck has kicked up a ruckus. The plebiscite would be held if the government was unable to muster 80 of parliament's 120 lawmakers to approve a withdrawal. In promoting the referendum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that it would prevent an irresponsible agreement, while facilitating strong public backing for one that satisfied Israel's national interests.
Arab reaction has been unenthusiastic. The Syrian Foreign Ministry found the law to be further proof that Israel was not interested in peace. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said that "ending the occupation" could not be put to a referendum. A curious stance in that Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly raised the possibility of a Palestinian referendum and been lauded for doing so by Arabists in the American foreign policy community.
Israeli reactions have run along political lines. Both left and right saw passage as an impediment to the emergence of a Palestinian state. Technically, no referendum would be required for a West Bank pullback since Judea and Samaria have never been annexed to Israel. But settler leaders said the law was "very good news" in that any deal would likely be linked to land swaps in sovereign Israel. Haaretz editorialized that the law spit in the face of the international community. Peace Now threatened to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and 15 of her 28-member faction voted against the bill; Shaul Mofaz, who has announced plans to unseat her, was joined by 11 other party lawmakers in being conspicuously absent. Kadima's Otniel Schneller and Eli Aflalo voted for the bill. Labor leader Ehud Barak issued a strong statement against the bill, but also absented himself rather than vote with most of his faction against it. Likud, Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, and Habayit Hayehudi voted unanimously in favor; Meretz and the Arab parties voted unanimously against. The left's opposition is also somewhat curious in that it was Yitzhak Rabin who first raised the idea of a withdrawal referendum.
Whether referendums are generally a good idea is a matter for debate. They certainly provide the demos (people) kratos (rule) – direct power to legislate without intermediaries. America's political system is, of course, designed to keep unrefined power out of the hands of the masses for fear of the tyranny of the majority. Authoritarian leaders have been known to conduct and manipulate referendums to solidify their power. For example, in 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini legitimized the establishment of Iran's imperial theocracy by holding a popular plebiscite.
What does the referendum decision signify in the Israeli instance? Whether to withdraw to something approximating the 1949 Armistice Lines in exchange for an Arab commitment of, at best, a cold peace presents Israelis with an immense dilemma. Such boundaries would be very hard to defend especially if the West Bank falls to Hamas. A pullout ratified by a razor thin Knesset majority lubricated by political horse-trading would lack legitimacy and tear the fabric of Israel's society asunder. It's happened in the past: The 1993 Oslo Accords were approved with 61 MKs in favor 50 against and 8 abstentions. Oslo II, a follow-up agreement, passed 61-59 only after three neophyte opposition members were enticed to join Rabin's government in exchange for patronage appointments.
Of course, a referendum would be less imperative were Israel's political system less dysfunctional (all major parties agree on the need for fundamental electoral reform). Netanyahu, who was opposition leader at the time Rabin railroaded Oslo through the Knesset, clearly recognizes that any deal he signs with the Palestinians or Syrians would equally lack authenticity unless it achieved massive Knesset backing or popular support in a referendum.
For all the hoopla raised by the referendum law the reality is that Abbas still refuses to return to the negotiating table and Hamas makes no pretense about wanting peace altogether. The role Israeli Arabs (20 percent of the population) would have in a referendum is unclear. Israel's High Court could still decide that the referendum is unconstitutional. And of course, the Knesset could vote at anytime repeal to repeal the law by a simple majority. In short, champions of peace have little to fear and much to embrace in this law.
Gas Cornucopia
The blessing for the Promised Land was that it would flow with milk and honey, not abundant rainfall or copious petro-carbon deposits. Fortunately, within the next several years a series of desalination plants will help alleviate Israel's chronic water shortage while continued exploitation of off-shore gas fields should make the Jewish state energy independent – and more.
Since 2004, Israel has been tapping billions of cubic meters of gas from two deep-sea fields, Mari-B and Marine, just off its southern coast. But it is the still untapped fields off the country's northern coast, and so deep below the Mediterranean that robots will be needed to exploit them, that has truly captured the Israeli imagination. Leviathan, which is far out to sea, could come on-line in 2016, though Tamar and Dalit, smaller fields closer to the coast, could begin production in 2014.
These subterranean gas deposits have the potential of transforming Israel from a country completely dependent on foreign energy sources to a major global energy supplier. An Israeli pipeline could run via Cyprus to Greece providing Europe with gas for its winters and lessening the continent's dependency on Russia. Israeli liquefied gas could be shipped to India and China making them less dependent on Iran. At home, electrical plants could be retooled to operate on gas; electric (or hybrid) cars might supplant those running exclusively on petrol.
For now, however, Israel still imports $2 billion worth of gas annually from a privately owned Egyptian company. Coal needs to be imported to generate electricity; and petroleum is purchased on the world market. Until the mullahs came to power in 1979, Israel enjoyed a reliable supply of Iranian oil. Later, the Alma oil field in the Sinai, discovered and developed by Israel, could have provided energy independence, but was given up in the 1982 peace treaty with Egypt. Fortunately, most Israeli households use solar power to heat water.
Israel's foes have reacted predictably to its off-shore gas finds. Hezbollah, the hegemon of Lebanon, has been making threatening noises about the northern fields, while Palestinian advocates have claimed the southern fields as the patrimony of Hamas-dominated Gaza.
For Israel, striking gas is like winning the lottery – attendant with political, social and economic opportunities as well as pitfalls. The Tel Aviv stock market reacted euphorically as investors pondered the fortunes to be made. That led to a massive debate about who actually owned the gas cornucopia, the consortium of Israeli and American partners spearheaded by Yitzhak Teshuva who risked their capital (on searches that had for decades proved futile), or the "people." Back in 1952 the Knesset had legislated royalties of 12.5% on mining. The American government has been assessing royalties of 18.75% on off-shore oil and gas; in Norway the government takes a whopping 67 percent. Social campaigners demanded that the royalties be drastically hiked. Free marketers complained it was unfair to retroactively change the rules.
To sort out the division of spoils the Netanyahu government appointed a committee headed by economist Eytan Sheshinski. After seven months, and without inviting Teshuva to present his case, his panel decided that royalties should stay at 12.5%; that the tax exemption depletion allowance should be abolished; and that profits should not be taxed until investors had recovered 150% of their outlays.
These recommendations, which await a public hearing, cabinet debate and Knesset approval, have been lauded across the political spectrum from Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer to Labor's Shelly Yachimovich, a neo-socialist. So far Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party has been most vocal in expressing concern that the recommendations may discourage future energy exploration.
Even if a formula can be found that balances the rational need to provide incentives for entrepreneurs with the desires of ordinary citizens to benefit from the gas windfall there is still the question of precisely what the state will do with the money. Former Knesset member Michael Melchior has been lobbying for the revenues be channeled into a sovereign fund invested and earmarked to enhance the country's human potential. Anything would be better than dumping it into the general budget. There is, fortunately, time for considered judgment. Revenues from the northern fields will not begin flowing into the state's coffers for another 8-15 years, at the earliest.
Kadima in the Wings
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apparent about-face capitulation to Obama administration pressure for an extension of the moratorium on West Bank settlement construction has resulted in roiling dissension within his Likud party and a sense of déjà vu. The possibility of another split within the party cannot be discounted.
The previous Likud schism occurred in November 2005 when Ariel Sharon founded the Kadima party as a political workaround after Likud members rejected his plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza. After Sharon became incapacitated by a stroke, Ehud Olmert led Kadima in winning the 2006 elections by campaigning for a further unilateral separation this time from the Palestinians in the West Bank. However, aggression from Gaza and Lebanon (where Israel had in 2000 unilaterally withdrawn from a security zone) undermined the attraction of unilateralism and the policy was discarded.
Curiously, despite having lost its charismatic founder in Sharon and philosophical underpinning – unilateralism – the party has consolidated itself as a viable "third- way" alignment of pragmatists; basically a vehicle for running for office that has attracted politicians from Likud, Labor and beyond. Its Knesset line-up includes a West Bank settler and a Peace Now proponent. The New York Times has variously called Kadima "center-right" and "center-left."
It is widely understood that President Barack Obama would have preferred Israel's 2009 elections to have resulted in a Kadima-led government with Tzipi Livni (formerly of the Likud) at the helm. Washington is reportedly pressing Netanyahu to jettison right-wing coalition partners Yisrael Beitenu and Habayit Hayehudi and replace them with Kadima. This would presumably make Israel's negotiating stance more malleable. The flaw with this line of reasoning is that the previous Kadima government led by Olmert and Livni failed to close a deal with the Palestinian faction led by Mahmoud Abbas despite offering unprecedented territorial concessions on the grounds these were still insufficient.
What now for Kadima? Unlike other third-way parties that have come and gone, Kadima has demonstrated remarkable staying power. Partly this is because its leaders are no political novices, but in addition Kadima's arrival on the scene coincided with the evolution of a post-second intifada Israeli consensus that ending the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs was a vital national interest even if it resulted in the establishment of a "Palestine" alongside Israel.
Livni as opposition leader though photogenic has not emerged as a strong presence, furthering a reputation for indecisiveness established when she repeatedly hesitated to call for Olmert's resignation while he was enmeshed in a series of scandals and discredited by his handling of the Second Lebanon War. She also failed to form a government though Kadima won one more seat than Likud in the past election. And in a recent Knesset speech Livni took Netanyahu to task for his craven patronage of the ultra-Orthodox parties, only to have a haredi leader produce a draft agreement showing she had been equally ready to kowtow to their demands.
Livni is now being challenged by Shaul Mofaz, a former top general, whom she barely defeated for the party leadership in 2008. While her reputation for integrity is not an issue, Kadima is hardly a bastion of good-government reformists. Sharon had been investigated for wrongdoing on multiple occasions; Olmert is now on trial for corruption; policy chairman Haim Ramon was convicted of indecent behavior; Avraham Hirchson, a finance minister, went to prison for corruption. And in the latest incident, Tzahi Hanegbi, a party powerbroker, was forced to quit the Knesset this month having being found guilty of moral turpitude.
In spite of all this and the failure to articulate a coherent platform to replace unilateralism, Kadima and Likud continue to run neck and neck in public opinion surveys. Livni's confidantes have accused Netanyahu of spreading false rumors that Kadima is poised to join a unity government. She said that would not happen until Netanyahu accepted her conditions, though these have never been enunciated with much specificity. Still, Livni has pledged to give Netanyahu a political safety net if he goes ahead and extends the settlement freeze.
Strangely enough, Kadima's political nimbleness makes it attractive for disgruntled voters from left, center and right. Its success reflects the diminished expectations Israelis have of their elected officials. Ideological consistency, adherence to solemn campaign pledges, upstanding ethical behavior, even leadership excellence is no longer paramount. What seems to matter most is Kadima's ability to offer "pragmatism" -- whatever that may mean at any particular time.
The Brothers Lurk
November is a time for elections not just in the United States but also in Jordan and Egypt. Jordanians voted on November 9 to overwhelmingly fill the Chamber of Deputies with loyalists of King Abdullah II. Egyptians will go to the polls on November 28 to elect the People’s Assembly and there is little doubt that Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party will remain in control. As a result of short-sighted policies that have sidelined comparatively liberal reformist elements, the only viable opposition the Abdullah and Mubarak dynasties face comes from the benighted Moslem Brotherhood whose role in politics is severely restricted. Both leaders are mindful that Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the brotherhood, won 58% of the vote in free 2006 Palestinian Authority elections.
Founded in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, the brotherhood preaches pan-Islam, a worldwide Caliphate, the application of Sharia law to daily life and politics and – jihad. In 1950s and 60s Sayyid Qutb fine-tuned the brotherhood's Sunni ideology to emphasize opposition to Western values. Naturally, anti-Zionism has been integral to the movement since the 1930s and remains a rallying cry.
The 21st century brotherhood aims for a legitimate persona, playing down calls to violence and dissociating from the movement's most infamous devotees, al-Qaida's Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin-Laden. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood while frank about Sharia law insists that "under current circumstances" it has no ambitions to rule the country.
On Election Day in Jordan, a national holiday, candidate posters were plastered around providing the facade of widespread political activity. Jordanian authorities in point of fact encouraged brotherhood candidates to participate. But the Islamic Action Front, the local brotherhood affiliate, declared an election boycott on the grounds that new rules favoring directly elected candidates over blocs and freshly gerrymandered districts limited the movement's electoral possibilities. Violence was low. Authorities welcomed outside election observers. Turnout was a credible 53 percent nationally though much lower in urban and heavily Palestinian areas that are brotherhood strongholds. The only missing elements were a genuine opposition and the prospect that the newly-elected parliament could exercise authority independent of the monarchy.
Despite facing internal censure a single brotherhood contender ignored the boycott to run and win. Notably, candidates across the political spectrum campaigned against the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty and in support of resistance to "the Zionist entity." Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza comprise the original British Mandate for Palestine and most Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs. The king's backing comes mostly from tribal elements in the hinterlands.
In Egypt the brotherhood prefers participation to boycott. Independent candidates tied to the brotherhood have successfully filed paperwork to contest thirty percent of the seats in the assembly. In contrast to Jordan's more subtle strategy to the challenge posed by the brotherhood, Egyptian authorities have incarcerated brotherhood leaders and unleashed their heavies to beat-up brotherhood activists as they hang campaign posters. Foreign monitoring of the Egyptian polling will not be tolerated. This year, however, the ruling party is allowing intramural contests for the same constituency to create a semblance of competition. Despite similar obstacles in 2005, the brotherhood managed to capture 20 percent of the legislature.
Egypt's brotherhood has not been shy in playing the Israel card. Members have gotten themselves arrested in Port Said protesting Cairo's complicity in the quarantine of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Equally important, in both Egypt and Jordan the brotherhood mines for support among the great masses of economically downtrodden.
Neither regime appears in imminent danger of being destabilized by the brotherhood. At the same time, it is the pragmatism and patience of the Islamists that is most disquieting. One manifestation of its common sense approach: Islamist ecumenism best reflected in Hamas's theological justification for a Sunni-Shi'ite axis and alliance with Iran. Far from treating the Shi'ite Persian regime as schismatic, the Palestinian brothers have been emphasizing that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had himself translated the writings of Qutb into Persian.
What does all this mean? Unless Mideast autocrats can find the way and the wisdom to foster political institution-building, genuine republican government, and empower reformist elements prepared to reach an accommodation with modernity, sooner or later the fanatics will come to power. For Israel it would be preferable to face hard-hearted reformists across the bargaining table than jihadist across the battlefield. The other implication is that Iranian imperial ambitions, now dangerously melding with those of the brotherhood, need to be thwarted by the civilized world sooner rather than later.
Artful boycott
With the cocktail hour over the audience settled into their plush chairs to enjoy a performance of the musical Piaf inaugurating the new cultural center in Ariel earlier this month [November 8]. This was no ordinary opening night however, because in a move that ignited a political firestorm in Israel, some of the country's top artists and intellectuals had signed a petition pledging to boycott the center because it is located in the West Bank 25 miles east of Tel Aviv.
The big name boycotters included novelists David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Aharon Appelfeld, celebrated actress Hanna Maron, Batsheva dance company choreographer Ohad Naharin and film director Eytan Fox of Yossi & Jagger fame. They had all signed a statement terming Ariel "an illegal settlement" whose existence made peace impossible and fostered "apartheid."
Though the big names drew media coverage, the campaign was actually spearheaded by the minor playwright Vardit Shalfi. Her goal, she said, was to raise questions about "the legitimacy of the settlements." Shalfi told an interviewer that she would never set foot in Ariel though she would have no compunctions about appearing at a Jenin theater operated by a former Palestinian gunman. Why? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, she explained.
The campaign quickly drew the support of radical academics such as Ben-Gurion University's Neve Gordon, an advocate of the international campaign of boycott and divestment of Israel. Indeed, the Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel encouraged the Ariel boycotters while the San Francisco-based Jewish Voice for Peace jumped on the bandwagon by soliciting supporting signatures of stalwart Israel-bashers Ed Asner, Venessa Redgrave and Tony Kushner.
While it's no secret where Israel's arts community leans politically it is doubtful the big names on the Zionist left would be comfortable shunning Ariel in the company of the Jewish Voice for Peace crowd which cannot bring itself to support Israel's existence within any boundaries. For even more extreme advocates of the Arab cause the Ariel boycott is "bogus" because the "focus on settlements" obscures the "complicity" of all "Israeli academic and cultural institutions" in a system of "colonial control and apartheid" endured by the endlessly suffering Palestinians.
Predictably, given negligible support for a settlement boycott among mainstream Israelis, Shalfi's campaign raised as much debate about the role of artists in society as it did about settlements. Culture minister Limor Livnat has announced plans for a new prize to be awarded for Zionist contributions to art. And some Knesset members have threatened legislation that would withhold state financing of projects associated with the boycotters. To which Yossi Beilin, a leading proponent of the "peace process," retorted that in a democracy artists deserved the largesse of government even when they expressed unpopular views.
Why launch the boycott now? The impending completion of the cultural center was one obvious reason. Moreover, settlement opponents find places such as Ariel (and Ma'ale Adummim, outside Jerusalem) particularly vexing. With a mixed secular-Orthodox population of 20,000, plus an additional 10,000 students including Arabs enrolled in the town's college, Ariel is not easily denigrated as far away, alien and inhabited by settler crazies. Indeed, its strategic location means that Israel would likely push hard to retain the town in any peace treaty. Thus the boycotter's aim was to chip away at Ariel's image as part of normative Israel.
With the left-in-politics unpopular, fragmented, leaderless and out of ideas, its prospects for a return to governmental power next to nil, settlement opponents sought to exert their influence via a sector of Israel's population seemingly impervious to the slings and arrows wrought by Palestinian intransigence.
Indeed, while the Ariel boycott kerfuffle raised tempers within the Israeli body politic it seemed almost beside the point in the larger scheme of things. Top Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar this week reiterated that for his organization settlements were hardly the issue. The Palestinian goal, he declared, must be the expulsion of the Jews from all the land. Meanwhile, the comparatively moderate Palestinian faction headed by Mahmoud Abbas again insisted that the Palestinians would never abandon their demand for the "right" of millions of Arab refugees and their descendants to "return" to the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel nor would they ever recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
The reason the curtain has come down on the boycotters is that ordinary Israelis simply don't accept the premise that Ariel – and settlements like it – are what's really keeping the Palestinians from making peace.
What's not Right
The twenty-five Jewish fanatics who last month paraded provocatively in the Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm have been described as "right wing activists" and "far-right Israelis." Yet where – or whether – they belong on the Zionist political spectrum is not clear.
In pre-State days, the right embodied in the Jabotinsky movement was defined by its loyalty to Eretz Israel – as defined in the British Mandate for Palestine – and rooted Jewish civilizational values and nationalism. The movement has been unenthusiastic but not unwilling to sacrifice parts of the Jewish heartland for an accommodation with the Arabs.
In 1982 Menachem Begin withdrew from Sinai for a peace treaty with Egypt; in 2005 Ariel Sharon unilaterally pulled back from Gaza; and in his seminal 2009 Bar-Ilan speech Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel did not want to rule over the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria.
Why the break with Jabotinsky's original doctrine? Until 1977 the right-wing never led an Israeli government and enjoyed the luxury of ideologically purity. But as Sharon told intimates when he became the country's top decision maker, there are "things you see from here that you don't see from there." Such as the troubling demographic balance of Arabs and Jews west of the River Jordan; Israel's deepening diplomatic isolation; the emphatic need for foreign support in overcoming the existential threats posed by Iran and, not least, healing the deep cleavages within
Israel's body politic over the settlement enterprise. As the Jabotinsky right, founded, after all, by a 19th century classical liberal, was pulled toward pragmatism the political vacuum this created was filled largely by fervently Orthodox supporters of the slain Rabbi Meir Kahane. The youthful Kahane had begun his activism as a member of the Jabotinsky youth movement Betar. However, rigorous Orthodoxy and Zionist nationalism were never a natural fit. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews were and remain either non-Zionist or fervently anti-Zionist. The modern Orthodox were open to Zionism yet many of their old guard, such as Haim-Moshe Shapira, were unenthusiastic about settling the West Bank when the opportunity presented itself after the 1967 Six Day War.
When the U.S. born, originally modern Orthodox, Kahane moved to Israel in the early 1970s he sought an ideological home in the Jabotinsky camp led by Menachem Begin. When Begin declined Kahane formed the Kach party and ultimately won a single seat in the 1984 Knesset elections.
Kahane, whose platform called for the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, charged Baruch Marzal, his parliamentary aide, with drawing ultra-Orthodox elements into his movement. Marzel's efforts helped spawn a novel messianic apocalyptic political concoction. Where left and right-wing Zionists historically saw the state as an instrument of Jewish self-determination, Kahaneists see it as an obstacle to the establishment of an anti-modern theocratic Jewish commonwealth. Thus what places Kahaneists outside the standard Zionist framework is not the vehemence with which they oppose government policy but their commitment to regime change.
Like all political movements, Kahaneists are not monolithic. Moshe Feiglin prefers working peacefully within the establishment in the belief that the Israeli electorate can be persuaded to embrace regime change if the impetus comes from within the Likud party. Daniella Weiss, on the other hand, has become an organizer of the "hilltop youth" some of whom have bizarrely embraced the anthem of the virulently anti-state Satmar hassidic sect.
In the Knesset, Kahane's legacy is carried forward singly by Michael Ben Ari of the Ichud Leumi. The splinter party's three other parliamentarians are not Kahaneists. How many of Ichud Leumi's 112,570 votes can be credited to Ben Ari is impossible to gauge. But in 2006 when Marzel himself ran unsuccessfully for the Knesset he garnered 25,000 votes.
Other right-wing Knesset parties including the modern Orthodox Habayit Hayehudi and the largely secular Russian Yisrael Beitenu stuck with Netanyahu after his Bar-Ilan address. Neither has much use for the Kahaneists. Habayit Hayehudi has attacked Marzel for "desecrating religious Zionism" while Marzel and Lieberman hold each other in disdain. Settler elder Elyakim Haetzni has condemned the kind of violence associated with the Kahaneists.
Today's Zionist right is hawkish on security issues, steadfastly opposes a return to the 1949 Armistice Lines and is dubious about Palestinian intentions. In contrast, those who would upend rather than reform Israel's dysfunctional political system, oppose territorial concessions on the basis of God's will, are violence-prone and seek to supplant modern Israel with a theocracy fit elsewhere on Israel's political spectrum.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Latest Writings
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, November 08, 2010
OXFAM HAS MORE THAN AN IMAGE PROBLEM
I see that Oxfam which, I believe, was once a non-partisan charity and somehow evolved into another British/Euro-Left battering ram against Israel now accepts that it has a problem with the Jewish community.
Oxfam has now gone into collaboration with the Reform Movement in Israel on a joint anti-poverty project in the Jewish state.
Personally, I would not let Oxfam off the hook so easily, and it is unfortunate that the Reform Movement is a party to this effort.
Oxfam needs to do more than sanitize its image. It needs to do some soul-searching.
Oxfam has now gone into collaboration with the Reform Movement in Israel on a joint anti-poverty project in the Jewish state.
Personally, I would not let Oxfam off the hook so easily, and it is unfortunate that the Reform Movement is a party to this effort.
Oxfam needs to do more than sanitize its image. It needs to do some soul-searching.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The Next UN Security Council
Israelis are not alone in rolling their eyes at the mere mention of the United Nations. Thanks to blocs of like-minded nations with interlocking leaderships and overlapping interests—the 53-member African Union, the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, the 118-member "non-aligned" movement—an anti-Western and anti-Zionist tyranny of the majority has long been assured.
That's in the General Assembly. What about the 15-member Security Council, which has both more power and greater legitimacy than other UN bodies? In the Council's early years, when the democracies led by the United States presented a formidable front, most of the vetoes were cast by Soviet Russia. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has had to be the major exerciser of the veto, blocking, among other things, dozens of one-sided anti-Israel resolutions.
And, in the short to medium term, things can only get worse. The Council now has five veto-wielding permanent members: China, France, Russia, Britain, and the U.S. The other ten, enjoying two-year terms, are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Gabon, Lebanon, and Nigeria plus the newly elected Colombia, Germany, India, Portugal, and South Africa, whose term begins in January 2011.
Of these ten, India, Brazil, and South Africa already exercise global influence, and can be expected to join China and Russia in shilling for Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The three will likely also form a potent anti-American bloc of their own on the new Council. Last year, for example, only 11 percent of India's votes in the General Assembly lined up with Washington. Sixty-seven percent of South Africa's were on the opposite side. On thirteen issues identified by the State Department as "important," Brazil stood with the U.S. a total of three times. Among the other new non-permanent members, Gabon, a serial abuser of human rights, has made it a point almost never to vote with Washington.
And the Europeans? The U.S. can usually count on France, Britain, and Germany for support—except when it comes to Israel. At that point London and Paris invariably break away to take the Arab side or to abstain. The Germans, for their part, will invariably go along with the EU "consensus," at Israel's expense. Portugal's support of the Arab line on the notorious Goldstone Report probably helped it secure its new Council seat. Canada, by contrast, seems to have lost its bid precisely on account of its principled pro-Israel position.
This, then, is the environment in which the Council will monitor the ongoing Hizballah putsch in Lebanon and Hamas aggression from Gaza and, should it come to pass, consider the issue of a Palestinian unilateral declaration of statehood. South Africa has already declared that "the Security Council has to shoulder its responsibility for ending the Israeli occupation and [for] ensuring [that] the Palestinian people's right to self-determination is met." In a worst-case scenario, the Council could recognize the West Bank and Gaza, demarcated along the 1949 armistice lines, as "Palestine."
Prospects might appear less bleak if Israel held a Security Council seat of its own, which would enable it to participate in decisive closed-door deliberations. But, of the 192-member UN, only the Jewish state is ineligible to serve on the Council—because the Arabs will not allow it to join the regional group that is a steppingstone to Council membership. This state of affairs could become exponentially worse if decades-long efforts to enlarge the Council gain headway and result in a further dilution of Washington's ability to counter the UN's tyrannical majority. Promoting just such "structural reform" is one of India's announced priorities.
What about Jerusalem's ability to rely on Washington to defend its vital interests? Unfairly or not, worries on this score, too, are now being voiced, especially by those concerned lest the U.S. decide not to veto a declaration of unilateral Palestinian statehood. Such concerns serve further to underline the dramatic degree to which the world has changed since the victorious World War II leaders created the architecture of the Security Council. Never has the need been greater for a self-confident United States to dispel the fog of uncertainty and to spearhead the cause of nations sincerely opposed to the scourge of war and genuinely committed to human rights, social progress, and freedom.
--Nov. 2010
That's in the General Assembly. What about the 15-member Security Council, which has both more power and greater legitimacy than other UN bodies? In the Council's early years, when the democracies led by the United States presented a formidable front, most of the vetoes were cast by Soviet Russia. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has had to be the major exerciser of the veto, blocking, among other things, dozens of one-sided anti-Israel resolutions.
And, in the short to medium term, things can only get worse. The Council now has five veto-wielding permanent members: China, France, Russia, Britain, and the U.S. The other ten, enjoying two-year terms, are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Gabon, Lebanon, and Nigeria plus the newly elected Colombia, Germany, India, Portugal, and South Africa, whose term begins in January 2011.
Of these ten, India, Brazil, and South Africa already exercise global influence, and can be expected to join China and Russia in shilling for Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The three will likely also form a potent anti-American bloc of their own on the new Council. Last year, for example, only 11 percent of India's votes in the General Assembly lined up with Washington. Sixty-seven percent of South Africa's were on the opposite side. On thirteen issues identified by the State Department as "important," Brazil stood with the U.S. a total of three times. Among the other new non-permanent members, Gabon, a serial abuser of human rights, has made it a point almost never to vote with Washington.
And the Europeans? The U.S. can usually count on France, Britain, and Germany for support—except when it comes to Israel. At that point London and Paris invariably break away to take the Arab side or to abstain. The Germans, for their part, will invariably go along with the EU "consensus," at Israel's expense. Portugal's support of the Arab line on the notorious Goldstone Report probably helped it secure its new Council seat. Canada, by contrast, seems to have lost its bid precisely on account of its principled pro-Israel position.
This, then, is the environment in which the Council will monitor the ongoing Hizballah putsch in Lebanon and Hamas aggression from Gaza and, should it come to pass, consider the issue of a Palestinian unilateral declaration of statehood. South Africa has already declared that "the Security Council has to shoulder its responsibility for ending the Israeli occupation and [for] ensuring [that] the Palestinian people's right to self-determination is met." In a worst-case scenario, the Council could recognize the West Bank and Gaza, demarcated along the 1949 armistice lines, as "Palestine."
Prospects might appear less bleak if Israel held a Security Council seat of its own, which would enable it to participate in decisive closed-door deliberations. But, of the 192-member UN, only the Jewish state is ineligible to serve on the Council—because the Arabs will not allow it to join the regional group that is a steppingstone to Council membership. This state of affairs could become exponentially worse if decades-long efforts to enlarge the Council gain headway and result in a further dilution of Washington's ability to counter the UN's tyrannical majority. Promoting just such "structural reform" is one of India's announced priorities.
What about Jerusalem's ability to rely on Washington to defend its vital interests? Unfairly or not, worries on this score, too, are now being voiced, especially by those concerned lest the U.S. decide not to veto a declaration of unilateral Palestinian statehood. Such concerns serve further to underline the dramatic degree to which the world has changed since the victorious World War II leaders created the architecture of the Security Council. Never has the need been greater for a self-confident United States to dispel the fog of uncertainty and to spearhead the cause of nations sincerely opposed to the scourge of war and genuinely committed to human rights, social progress, and freedom.
--Nov. 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Guaranteed in America
Why should the Netanyahu government place any faith in the incentives offered by President Barack Obama in return for an extension of the moratorium on settlement construction? So grumble some Israelis, pointing for added emphasis to Obama's refusal to honor an earlier, Bush-administration pledge to Ariel Sharon. For these Israelis, such backtracking is another indication that Obama has broken with precedent and is bent on significantly shifting longstanding American practice toward Israel.
But what if the president is only following longstanding practice? As it happens, principles enunciated by one American president have regularly been ignored or silently repudiated by his successor, and some presidential commitments have enjoyed an even shorter shelf life than the one to which disillusioned Israelis now point.
Take the issue of borders. "It is clear that a return to the situation of June 4, 1967, will not bring peace," President Lyndon B. Johnson affirmed in a statement shortly after the Six Day war. Yet when the Nixon administration came into office in January 1969, Secretary of State William Rogers sounded quite a different note, insisting that "any changes in the [pre-war] lines should not reflect the weight of [Israeli] conquest."
Or take Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's 1975 promise that the U.S. would not negotiate with the PLO so long as that organization did not recognize Israel's right to exist. Two years later, the Carter administration came into office keen to open a dialogue with the PLO, and almost immediately began doing so through intermediaries. In 1978, Carter recognized "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" and authorized the PLO to operate an information office in Washington. His ambassador to Lebanon reportedly met with Yasir Arafat, and his representative to the UN was forced to resign after his own meetings with the PLO were publicly exposed.
Under the Reagan administration, secret contacts with the PLO continued unabated, while Secretary of State George Shultz initiated open meetings with members of the Palestine National Council (not, technically, PLO operatives). Ultimately, judging that Arafat had renounced terrorism and recognized Israel, the administration extended diplomatic recognition to the PLO.
A similar story can be told about presidential commitments opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The 1982 Reagan peace plan, issued on the heels of the PLO's expulsion from Beirut, reiterated Carter's earlier recognition of the "legitimate rights of the Palestinians" but pledged that the U.S. "will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza." When George H.W. Bush came into office, he reaffirmed the pledge but pressured Israel into attending the 1991 Madrid peace conference, an event that included Palestinian representatives widely understood to have been pre-approved by the PLO.
During the Clinton years, when Israel's Labor government itself opened negotiations with the PLO that would eventuate in the Oslo accords, the American administration naturally became a champion of Palestinian statehood (while pledging no contact with Hamas—another commitment that may soon go by the boards). Even when the PLO reneged on Oslo and resumed terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration, in its 2003 Road Map, reaffirmed America's new commitment to statehood—provided the Palestinians abandoned violence—and the president reiterated this commitment in 2005 despite the fact that Palestinian violence had not ceased.
This brings us back to the 2004 letter from Bush to Sharon. That letter, issued to support Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, acknowledged that Israel's final borders would have to be based on "new realities on the ground including already existing major Israeli population centers"—i.e., settlement blocs—in the West Bank. This "1967-plus" formula is what Obama now appears to be rejecting.
It may be that the old saying is right and that certain kinds of promises are made to be broken. But if so, the obvious lesson is only the need to keep that cautionary principle in mind when undertaking important strategic decisions hinging on presidential guarantees.
--- Oct. 2010
But what if the president is only following longstanding practice? As it happens, principles enunciated by one American president have regularly been ignored or silently repudiated by his successor, and some presidential commitments have enjoyed an even shorter shelf life than the one to which disillusioned Israelis now point.
Take the issue of borders. "It is clear that a return to the situation of June 4, 1967, will not bring peace," President Lyndon B. Johnson affirmed in a statement shortly after the Six Day war. Yet when the Nixon administration came into office in January 1969, Secretary of State William Rogers sounded quite a different note, insisting that "any changes in the [pre-war] lines should not reflect the weight of [Israeli] conquest."
Or take Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's 1975 promise that the U.S. would not negotiate with the PLO so long as that organization did not recognize Israel's right to exist. Two years later, the Carter administration came into office keen to open a dialogue with the PLO, and almost immediately began doing so through intermediaries. In 1978, Carter recognized "the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" and authorized the PLO to operate an information office in Washington. His ambassador to Lebanon reportedly met with Yasir Arafat, and his representative to the UN was forced to resign after his own meetings with the PLO were publicly exposed.
Under the Reagan administration, secret contacts with the PLO continued unabated, while Secretary of State George Shultz initiated open meetings with members of the Palestine National Council (not, technically, PLO operatives). Ultimately, judging that Arafat had renounced terrorism and recognized Israel, the administration extended diplomatic recognition to the PLO.
A similar story can be told about presidential commitments opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The 1982 Reagan peace plan, issued on the heels of the PLO's expulsion from Beirut, reiterated Carter's earlier recognition of the "legitimate rights of the Palestinians" but pledged that the U.S. "will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza." When George H.W. Bush came into office, he reaffirmed the pledge but pressured Israel into attending the 1991 Madrid peace conference, an event that included Palestinian representatives widely understood to have been pre-approved by the PLO.
During the Clinton years, when Israel's Labor government itself opened negotiations with the PLO that would eventuate in the Oslo accords, the American administration naturally became a champion of Palestinian statehood (while pledging no contact with Hamas—another commitment that may soon go by the boards). Even when the PLO reneged on Oslo and resumed terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration, in its 2003 Road Map, reaffirmed America's new commitment to statehood—provided the Palestinians abandoned violence—and the president reiterated this commitment in 2005 despite the fact that Palestinian violence had not ceased.
This brings us back to the 2004 letter from Bush to Sharon. That letter, issued to support Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, acknowledged that Israel's final borders would have to be based on "new realities on the ground including already existing major Israeli population centers"—i.e., settlement blocs—in the West Bank. This "1967-plus" formula is what Obama now appears to be rejecting.
It may be that the old saying is right and that certain kinds of promises are made to be broken. But if so, the obvious lesson is only the need to keep that cautionary principle in mind when undertaking important strategic decisions hinging on presidential guarantees.
--- Oct. 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Europe is of two minds
A plot by Arab men holding European citizenship to carry out Mumbai-like shooting attacks in France, Germany and Britain has been uncovered by Western intelligence services. The United States has apparently thwarted the planned attacks with an intensified targeted killing campaign, using drone aircraft, of suspected Taliban and al-Qaida-backed terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghan border.
However, the danger posed by radicalized Muslims in Europe is hardly diminished. Dozens of German, Dutch, French and British Islamists are presently undergoing military training in Pakistan-Afghanistan hoping to replicate the bloodletting carried out by their predecessors including the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191; and the July 2005 attacks on London's transport system that took 56 lives. That subsequent attacks failed, among them the second try against London's transport system, car bombs that did not explode in London, the failure to blow up Glasgow's airport terminal, can be put down to chance. Numerous other plots were frustrated by security forces before they could be carried out.
The heightened state of alert, the long security lines at airports, the bomb-sniffing dogs at railroad stations have fostered an atmosphere of frustration and intimidation. The result? Forbearance for Islamist "values" is on decline. There is, for instance, widespread support across the political spectrum for banning the burka. A poll found that 74% of Spaniards agreed that a "clash of civilizations" was underway. In France, only 45% of respondents believed the country's Muslims were loyal. In the UK, a majority of people associated Islam with terrorism and the repression of women.
Notably, however, the popular -- and in some cases public policy -- rebuff of Islamist bullying has not carried over to European attitudes about the Palestinians. The Islamist crusade against Israel has somehow been inoculated from reproach in Europe on both the governmental and grass-roots level.
Whatever their qualms about Islamism and Arab extremism at home, Spain's socialist government and France's center-right government collaborate within the European Union on behalf of a Palestinian Authority that, partly on Islamic grounds, rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Nicolas Sarkozy's opponents have labeled him as pro-Israel, yet one would be hard-pressed to say where his positions differ from those enunciated by Mahmoud Abbas. Over the summer, France symbolically upgraded its diplomatic recognition of the Palestinian delegation in Paris. Madrid and Paris have jointly spearheaded efforts for European Union recognition of Palestinian statehood regardless of the outcome of negotiations between Israel and the PA. The situation is little better in the UK where the new Conservative-led government has embraced the Foreign Office's customary chilly outlook toward Israel, demanding a complete lifting of the quarantine against Hamas-controlled Gaza and labeling housing construction anywhere over the Green Line "a major barrier" to peace.
There is also no discernible backlash of Western public opinion over Palestinian bellicosity. Take the latest polling conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research which garnered considerable coverage for its finding that most Palestinian Arabs oppose negotiations with Israel unless the settlement construction freeze is extended. Considerably less attention has been drawn to another aspect of the survey: A majority of Palestinians supported the recent murders of two Israeli men and two women -- one of whom was pregnant -- near Hebron notwithstanding the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that were getting under way.
Europeans may be on their way to rejecting the scurrilous "root causes" explanation which seeks to excuse violent behavior by their own Muslim extremists, but this thinking does not carry over in the case of Palestinian brutality against Israel. The reasons are undoubtedly manifold: Palestinian groups have lately tended to confine their aggression to universally detested "settlers;" the deplorable campaign of demonization and de-legitimization of Israel manifest in the European media apparently excuses even the most contemptible Palestinian behavior; and the misguided decoupling of the Palestinian issue from the overall Islamist agenda has further muddied the waters. Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, gets a pass because the target of its violence is Israel.
Europe appears to be of two minds, showing growing intolerance of jihadi terrorization at home while urging Israel to accommodate Islamist intimidation in the Middle East. Old fashioned prejudice may be part of the explanation. Three-quarters of all Spaniards surveyed in 2009 exhibited classic anti-Semitic tendencies, and polls show large European majorities hold negative views of the Jewish state. Rather than treat Israel as the "Jew among nations," Europe would do better to appreciate that Israel's security is integral to the future of Western civilization.
However, the danger posed by radicalized Muslims in Europe is hardly diminished. Dozens of German, Dutch, French and British Islamists are presently undergoing military training in Pakistan-Afghanistan hoping to replicate the bloodletting carried out by their predecessors including the 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191; and the July 2005 attacks on London's transport system that took 56 lives. That subsequent attacks failed, among them the second try against London's transport system, car bombs that did not explode in London, the failure to blow up Glasgow's airport terminal, can be put down to chance. Numerous other plots were frustrated by security forces before they could be carried out.
The heightened state of alert, the long security lines at airports, the bomb-sniffing dogs at railroad stations have fostered an atmosphere of frustration and intimidation. The result? Forbearance for Islamist "values" is on decline. There is, for instance, widespread support across the political spectrum for banning the burka. A poll found that 74% of Spaniards agreed that a "clash of civilizations" was underway. In France, only 45% of respondents believed the country's Muslims were loyal. In the UK, a majority of people associated Islam with terrorism and the repression of women.
Notably, however, the popular -- and in some cases public policy -- rebuff of Islamist bullying has not carried over to European attitudes about the Palestinians. The Islamist crusade against Israel has somehow been inoculated from reproach in Europe on both the governmental and grass-roots level.
Whatever their qualms about Islamism and Arab extremism at home, Spain's socialist government and France's center-right government collaborate within the European Union on behalf of a Palestinian Authority that, partly on Islamic grounds, rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Nicolas Sarkozy's opponents have labeled him as pro-Israel, yet one would be hard-pressed to say where his positions differ from those enunciated by Mahmoud Abbas. Over the summer, France symbolically upgraded its diplomatic recognition of the Palestinian delegation in Paris. Madrid and Paris have jointly spearheaded efforts for European Union recognition of Palestinian statehood regardless of the outcome of negotiations between Israel and the PA. The situation is little better in the UK where the new Conservative-led government has embraced the Foreign Office's customary chilly outlook toward Israel, demanding a complete lifting of the quarantine against Hamas-controlled Gaza and labeling housing construction anywhere over the Green Line "a major barrier" to peace.
There is also no discernible backlash of Western public opinion over Palestinian bellicosity. Take the latest polling conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research which garnered considerable coverage for its finding that most Palestinian Arabs oppose negotiations with Israel unless the settlement construction freeze is extended. Considerably less attention has been drawn to another aspect of the survey: A majority of Palestinians supported the recent murders of two Israeli men and two women -- one of whom was pregnant -- near Hebron notwithstanding the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that were getting under way.
Europeans may be on their way to rejecting the scurrilous "root causes" explanation which seeks to excuse violent behavior by their own Muslim extremists, but this thinking does not carry over in the case of Palestinian brutality against Israel. The reasons are undoubtedly manifold: Palestinian groups have lately tended to confine their aggression to universally detested "settlers;" the deplorable campaign of demonization and de-legitimization of Israel manifest in the European media apparently excuses even the most contemptible Palestinian behavior; and the misguided decoupling of the Palestinian issue from the overall Islamist agenda has further muddied the waters. Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, gets a pass because the target of its violence is Israel.
Europe appears to be of two minds, showing growing intolerance of jihadi terrorization at home while urging Israel to accommodate Islamist intimidation in the Middle East. Old fashioned prejudice may be part of the explanation. Three-quarters of all Spaniards surveyed in 2009 exhibited classic anti-Semitic tendencies, and polls show large European majorities hold negative views of the Jewish state. Rather than treat Israel as the "Jew among nations," Europe would do better to appreciate that Israel's security is integral to the future of Western civilization.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Minutes of War
The October 6th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War was accompanied this year by the unexpected release of war cabinet minutes by Israel's State Archives covering the opening days of the fighting. There were no startling revelations; certainly no references to Israel's purported nuclear capabilities; or confirmation that defense minister Moshe Dayan told prime minister Golda Meir that "the Third Temple is in danger." Still, the publication of the protocols reopened old wounds and temporarily threw "start-up nation" Israel into an existential funk.
Though there have been countless war histories, memoires by key participants, and the official findings of the Agranat Commission -- which blamed David Elazar, the country's top general, for allowing the army to be taken by surprise -- the cabinet transcripts provided a fresh sense of immediacy. Here was Meir worrying aloud that the dangers Israel faced were even greater than those it confronted during the 1948 War of Independence. The publicly unflappable Moshe Dayan is in despair telling the cabinet that the war was being lost; that Syria and Egypt could conquer Israel; that Jordan would likely open-up a third front. "I didn't sufficiently appreciate the strength of the enemy" and overestimated the IDF's ability to cope with this kind of attack, he admits. The Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles are taking a devastating toll on the air force. There is talk of calling up older high-school students, long-retired reservists, even enlisting Diaspora Jews. Meir offers to travel secretly to Washington where she would throw herself at Richard Nixon's mercy.
The released minutes created a hue and cry even though the peril Israel faced during those dark days is no secret. Elazar partisans press again for his full public rehabilitation; after all, the minutes show him cool-headed, wisely urging -- against Dayan's recommendation -- a full IDF mobilization. Some columnists take Dayan to task for his willingness to abandon wounded soldiers to their fate after Egyptian forces overran the Bar-Lev Line fortifications. His daughter Yael tells Israel Radio that her late father had written openly of his regrets in his memoirs.
Post-Zionists relish the harm done to Dayan's image -- another Zionist icon punctured. For Israel's left, the message of the minutes is about the limitations of Israeli military power. The current cabinet is urged to pursue compromise over political stagnation and more war. Security hawks draw other lessons. By the morning of October 6, 1973 Israel had compelling, albeit imperfect, intelligence to recommend a preemptive attack. Meir worried that if Israel struck first, the international community would blame the Jews for the war: “The world’s nastiness is plain to see. They won’t believe us."
The protocols strike a chord with Israelis who know that for all their country's technological prowess and despite its Western standard of living, the existential dangers the Jewish state faced 37 years ago are no less real today. Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons and unequivocal about its genocidal intentions toward the Zionist enterprise. Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon into an Iranian satellite. Syria, aligned with Iran, is a constant menace. Hamas controlled Gaza is also in Iran's orbit. Meantime, even moderate Palestinian Arabs reject the mantra: "Two states, one Jewish, one Arab, living side-by-side in peace."
Israelis know, too, that an all-out war nowadays, when missiles pose a near-insurmountable danger, could devastate Israel's civilian population concentrated along the country's narrow coastal plain. Fortunately, a combination of determination and healthy denial provides ordinary Israelis with the coping mechanism necessary to go about their daily lives.
The minutes inform contemporary decision makers that intelligence about enemy intentions especially in wartime is imperfect. Fortunately, the Syrians and Egyptians hadn't grasped the extent of Israel's unpreparedness and did not press their advantage. Perhaps their goals were limited in the first place. In any event, the minutes challenge the notion that the diplomatic fallout of a preemptive attack makes it smart policy to absorb the first blow. If that were the case, UN Security Council Resolution 338, which ended the war, would have given Israel credit for waiting to be attacked and suffering 2,656 dead and 7,000 wounded.
Israel's current top general, Gabi Ashkenazi, writes that the nation has taken on board the main lesson of the Yom Kippur War: never to underestimate any enemy and never to allow intelligence to lead to false certainties.
-- October 2010
Though there have been countless war histories, memoires by key participants, and the official findings of the Agranat Commission -- which blamed David Elazar, the country's top general, for allowing the army to be taken by surprise -- the cabinet transcripts provided a fresh sense of immediacy. Here was Meir worrying aloud that the dangers Israel faced were even greater than those it confronted during the 1948 War of Independence. The publicly unflappable Moshe Dayan is in despair telling the cabinet that the war was being lost; that Syria and Egypt could conquer Israel; that Jordan would likely open-up a third front. "I didn't sufficiently appreciate the strength of the enemy" and overestimated the IDF's ability to cope with this kind of attack, he admits. The Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles are taking a devastating toll on the air force. There is talk of calling up older high-school students, long-retired reservists, even enlisting Diaspora Jews. Meir offers to travel secretly to Washington where she would throw herself at Richard Nixon's mercy.
The released minutes created a hue and cry even though the peril Israel faced during those dark days is no secret. Elazar partisans press again for his full public rehabilitation; after all, the minutes show him cool-headed, wisely urging -- against Dayan's recommendation -- a full IDF mobilization. Some columnists take Dayan to task for his willingness to abandon wounded soldiers to their fate after Egyptian forces overran the Bar-Lev Line fortifications. His daughter Yael tells Israel Radio that her late father had written openly of his regrets in his memoirs.
Post-Zionists relish the harm done to Dayan's image -- another Zionist icon punctured. For Israel's left, the message of the minutes is about the limitations of Israeli military power. The current cabinet is urged to pursue compromise over political stagnation and more war. Security hawks draw other lessons. By the morning of October 6, 1973 Israel had compelling, albeit imperfect, intelligence to recommend a preemptive attack. Meir worried that if Israel struck first, the international community would blame the Jews for the war: “The world’s nastiness is plain to see. They won’t believe us."
The protocols strike a chord with Israelis who know that for all their country's technological prowess and despite its Western standard of living, the existential dangers the Jewish state faced 37 years ago are no less real today. Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons and unequivocal about its genocidal intentions toward the Zionist enterprise. Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon into an Iranian satellite. Syria, aligned with Iran, is a constant menace. Hamas controlled Gaza is also in Iran's orbit. Meantime, even moderate Palestinian Arabs reject the mantra: "Two states, one Jewish, one Arab, living side-by-side in peace."
Israelis know, too, that an all-out war nowadays, when missiles pose a near-insurmountable danger, could devastate Israel's civilian population concentrated along the country's narrow coastal plain. Fortunately, a combination of determination and healthy denial provides ordinary Israelis with the coping mechanism necessary to go about their daily lives.
The minutes inform contemporary decision makers that intelligence about enemy intentions especially in wartime is imperfect. Fortunately, the Syrians and Egyptians hadn't grasped the extent of Israel's unpreparedness and did not press their advantage. Perhaps their goals were limited in the first place. In any event, the minutes challenge the notion that the diplomatic fallout of a preemptive attack makes it smart policy to absorb the first blow. If that were the case, UN Security Council Resolution 338, which ended the war, would have given Israel credit for waiting to be attacked and suffering 2,656 dead and 7,000 wounded.
Israel's current top general, Gabi Ashkenazi, writes that the nation has taken on board the main lesson of the Yom Kippur War: never to underestimate any enemy and never to allow intelligence to lead to false certainties.
-- October 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, October 04, 2010
The unlovable Avigdor Lieberman
Avigdor Lieberman's September 28th speech at the UN General Assembly – delivered in English and broadcast live by Al-Jazeera – was not well received. The doyen of Israeli left-wing columnists, Yediot Aharonot's Nahum Barnea, dismissed his country's foreign minister as a "clown." Haaretz editorialized for Lieberman's resignation. Britain's Daily Telegraph characterized the address as "inflammatory.”
And dismissing Lieberman as "a West Bank settler" not "committed to peacemaking," the Los Angeles Times editorialized that Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin would never have allowed a foreign minister of theirs to articulate views that contradicted government policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must either be duplicitous, in implying Lieberman's address did not have his backing, or politically enfeebled, the newspaper adjudged.
There is no disputing the fact that the speech was "off-message" -- differing from the accommodationist tone Netanyahu has set – and delivered by a reviled envoy. What is debatable is whether Lieberman's unhelpful address deserved the opprobrium heaped upon it; and whether the claim that foreign ministers loyally adhere to the political line set by their premiers is factual.
First to the substance of Lieberman's speech which began by stating the obvious: Israel's political arena is not divided between those who want peace and those who prefer a Greater Israel. Instead, Israel's majority is divided over how to secure peace. The Arabs controlled the West Bank and Gaza for nearly two decades and "no-one tried to create a Palestinian state," Lieberman pointed out. Yet, later, settlements notwithstanding, "peace agreements were achieved with Egypt and Jordan." There being no trust between Israelis and Palestinians and with policy differences as knotty as they are, Lieberman recommended that the parties aim for "a long-term intermediate agreement" rather than an absolute resolution of the conflict in a matter of months.
More controversially, he argued that "the guiding principle for a final status agreement must not be land-for-peace but rather [an] exchange of populated territory." Conflicts elsewhere, he stated, which had involved competing national and religious narratives -- post-communist Czechoslovakia and of East Timor, for instance – had been eased by redrawing boundaries. "Let me be very clear," Lieberman said, "I am not speaking about moving populations, but rather about moving borders to better reflect demographic realities."
Lieberman's plan may be geographically unworkable, as veteran Israeli journalist Yaron London has convincingly argued. Few imagine it will ever garner Palestinian approval. Yet on a purely moral plane, it would be hard to argue an exchange of populated territory is inherently a more nefarious idea than advocating a complete Israeli withdrawal to the hard-to-defend armistice lines in effect between 1949 and 1967 – Abba Eban's "Auschwitz borders."
Lieberman's decision to present his scheme at the General Assembly highlights a structural anomaly in Israel's political system. The job of foreign minister is a patronage appointment. Prime ministers usually have to tap rivals from within their own party or from among requisite coalition partners. As a result, foreign ministers seldom see themselves as loyal-bound to a premier. Moshe Sharett vehemently disapproved of David Ben-Gurion's security policies. Moshe Dayan represented Menachem Begin only to the extent that their views coincided. Shimon Peres offered territorial concessions to the Palestinians without first clearing them with Yitzhak Rabin. Tzipi Livni sessions with Ahmed Qurei were a sideshow to Ehud Olmert's bargaining with Mahmoud Abbas. Silvan Shalom was hardly Ariel Sharon's vicar of foreign policy any more than David Levy or Shimon Peres were for Yitzhak Shamir. Thankfully, during the crisis years of the second intifada, Sharon and Peres worked mostly in tandem because they agreed on the overriding need to quash Palestinian aggression.
It was therefore not all that odd for Netanyahu's office to distance itself from Lieberman's speech, to state that the foreign minister had not coordinated his address with the premier, and to recall that Netanyahu – not Lieberman – is actually heading negotiations with the Palestinians. Some will seek Machiavellian explanations for the speech and the premier's response to it, perhaps giving the two more credit, as politicians and statesmen, than they deserve.
What would it take for Israeli foreign policy-makers to speak with one voice?
Nothing short of jettisoning Israel's electoral system of pure proportional representation, and empowering premier's to dismiss wayward cabinet ministers without grievous political cost. Plainly, it is easier to lash out at the unlovable Avigdor Lieberman than muster the integrity and energy necessary to fix what is really wrong.
-- October 2010
And dismissing Lieberman as "a West Bank settler" not "committed to peacemaking," the Los Angeles Times editorialized that Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin would never have allowed a foreign minister of theirs to articulate views that contradicted government policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must either be duplicitous, in implying Lieberman's address did not have his backing, or politically enfeebled, the newspaper adjudged.
There is no disputing the fact that the speech was "off-message" -- differing from the accommodationist tone Netanyahu has set – and delivered by a reviled envoy. What is debatable is whether Lieberman's unhelpful address deserved the opprobrium heaped upon it; and whether the claim that foreign ministers loyally adhere to the political line set by their premiers is factual.
First to the substance of Lieberman's speech which began by stating the obvious: Israel's political arena is not divided between those who want peace and those who prefer a Greater Israel. Instead, Israel's majority is divided over how to secure peace. The Arabs controlled the West Bank and Gaza for nearly two decades and "no-one tried to create a Palestinian state," Lieberman pointed out. Yet, later, settlements notwithstanding, "peace agreements were achieved with Egypt and Jordan." There being no trust between Israelis and Palestinians and with policy differences as knotty as they are, Lieberman recommended that the parties aim for "a long-term intermediate agreement" rather than an absolute resolution of the conflict in a matter of months.
More controversially, he argued that "the guiding principle for a final status agreement must not be land-for-peace but rather [an] exchange of populated territory." Conflicts elsewhere, he stated, which had involved competing national and religious narratives -- post-communist Czechoslovakia and of East Timor, for instance – had been eased by redrawing boundaries. "Let me be very clear," Lieberman said, "I am not speaking about moving populations, but rather about moving borders to better reflect demographic realities."
Lieberman's plan may be geographically unworkable, as veteran Israeli journalist Yaron London has convincingly argued. Few imagine it will ever garner Palestinian approval. Yet on a purely moral plane, it would be hard to argue an exchange of populated territory is inherently a more nefarious idea than advocating a complete Israeli withdrawal to the hard-to-defend armistice lines in effect between 1949 and 1967 – Abba Eban's "Auschwitz borders."
Lieberman's decision to present his scheme at the General Assembly highlights a structural anomaly in Israel's political system. The job of foreign minister is a patronage appointment. Prime ministers usually have to tap rivals from within their own party or from among requisite coalition partners. As a result, foreign ministers seldom see themselves as loyal-bound to a premier. Moshe Sharett vehemently disapproved of David Ben-Gurion's security policies. Moshe Dayan represented Menachem Begin only to the extent that their views coincided. Shimon Peres offered territorial concessions to the Palestinians without first clearing them with Yitzhak Rabin. Tzipi Livni sessions with Ahmed Qurei were a sideshow to Ehud Olmert's bargaining with Mahmoud Abbas. Silvan Shalom was hardly Ariel Sharon's vicar of foreign policy any more than David Levy or Shimon Peres were for Yitzhak Shamir. Thankfully, during the crisis years of the second intifada, Sharon and Peres worked mostly in tandem because they agreed on the overriding need to quash Palestinian aggression.
It was therefore not all that odd for Netanyahu's office to distance itself from Lieberman's speech, to state that the foreign minister had not coordinated his address with the premier, and to recall that Netanyahu – not Lieberman – is actually heading negotiations with the Palestinians. Some will seek Machiavellian explanations for the speech and the premier's response to it, perhaps giving the two more credit, as politicians and statesmen, than they deserve.
What would it take for Israeli foreign policy-makers to speak with one voice?
Nothing short of jettisoning Israel's electoral system of pure proportional representation, and empowering premier's to dismiss wayward cabinet ministers without grievous political cost. Plainly, it is easier to lash out at the unlovable Avigdor Lieberman than muster the integrity and energy necessary to fix what is really wrong.
-- October 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Introducing Ed Miliband
The newly elected leader of the British Labor Party, 40-year-old Ed Miliband, pledged during his campaign to visit Gaza, the West Bank and Israel to see first-hand "what is happening on the ground." But Labor's first Jewish leader is expected to make Britain's budget and debt burden – not foreign affairs – his top priority. Though union support gave Ed Miliband his narrow margin of victory over brother David, he has moved quickly to jettison his "Red Ed" moniker.
What to make of Miliband's Jewishness? He makes no effort to deny his origins; neither is there any sentimentality for Jewish civilization. His parents fled Europe as Jews but raised their children to embrace exclusively "progressive" values. His Polish-born mother is an ardent pro-Palestinian activist. His late Belgian-born father was said to have evinced early Zionist sympathies before becoming permanently enamored with Marxism.
Plainly, Miliband will be no particular asset to Britain's 262,000-plus Jewish community. Likewise, his frosty attitude toward the Jewish state is not likely to undergo metamorphosis. He has described himself as a “critical friend of Israel” who opposes "blanket boycotts of goods from Israel." As a Euro-liberal he acknowledges Israel's right to self-defense purely in the abstract. For Miliband, even Israel's "right to exist" is implicitly conditioned on its ability to deliver "justice for the Palestinians." No wonder that party hard-liners fixated by the Palestinian Arab cause gravitated to his campaign.
Miliband takes the helm of a party that has always been of two minds about Zionism and Jews, its early association with the urban Jewish working classes notwithstanding. Nowadays, demographic and class shifts – there are fewer Jewish cabbies and more Jewish lawyers – have left Jews without influence in unions and their political loyalties mostly split between Labor and the Tories.
Founded in 1900, Labor began as an amalgamation of the Fabian Society, trade unions and a precursor socialist party. This did not automatically translate into tolerant attitudes toward Jews. The unions, for instance, supported passage of the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at restricting Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia. In 1911, trade unionists carried out a pogrom in Wales that forced out local Jewish merchants. On the other hand, in 1917, Labor warmly championed Jewish settlement in Palestine. And in 1922, Labor sent its first Jewish member, union leader Manny Shinwell, to parliament.
In the dark days before World War II, Labor only grudgingly accepted the necessity of rearmament against Nazi Germany. In opposition in 1944, Labor's platform was friendly toward Zionist aspirations; and in 1945 the party was calling for an end to Britain's heartless barring of Jewish immigration to Palestine.
All that changed within months of Labor's sweeping post-war election victory as foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, a former labor organizer with strong anti-Jewish prejudices, totally embraced the Arab line. The party remained hostile toward the Zionist enterprise until end of mandate and beyond. Paradoxically, this same Labor electoral victory sent an astounding 26 Jews to parliament. But as Prof. Geoffrey Alderman makes clear, not only did they not form a Jewish caucus, only six could be cajoled to venture the slightest public opposition to Bevin's catastrophic Palestine policies.
After Israel's War of Independence, the Labor government petulantly withheld diplomatic recognition until February 1949. Similarly, in 1956, Labor's Jewish MPs, then in opposition, refused to break ranks with party leader Hugh Gaitskell over his nasty criticism of Israel during the Sinai Campaign.
By the 1960s Labor's hard-left factions were on the ascendant. Yet even moderate prime minister Harold Wilson was cold to Israel's entreaties in the lead up to 1967 war. After Labor's 1979 defeat by Margaret Thatcher, the party only barely adjusted its leftward drift replacing Michael Foot with Neil Kinnock. The moderates regained control over the party when Tony Blair led "New Labor" to power in 1997. During Blair's long reign hostility toward Israel – and oftentimes obliquely toward Jews -- by Labor's supporters in the media, unions and academia became viral. Though Blair incessantly lobbied Washington to extract strategically costly diplomatic concessions from Israel during the second intifada, his continuing opposition to the Jewish state's de-legitimization tarred him as a philo-Zionist among leftists.
That era ended in May when Conservative David Cameron defeated Blair's successor Gordon Brown. Now, Miliband's victory makes it official: New Labor is finished.
Miliband is a radical optimist with a pragmatic streak. The new leader's hardheaded assessment may be that Israel-bashing provides few political benefits against an incumbent premier whose lack of empathy for the Zionist enterprise parallels his own.
-- September 2010
What to make of Miliband's Jewishness? He makes no effort to deny his origins; neither is there any sentimentality for Jewish civilization. His parents fled Europe as Jews but raised their children to embrace exclusively "progressive" values. His Polish-born mother is an ardent pro-Palestinian activist. His late Belgian-born father was said to have evinced early Zionist sympathies before becoming permanently enamored with Marxism.
Plainly, Miliband will be no particular asset to Britain's 262,000-plus Jewish community. Likewise, his frosty attitude toward the Jewish state is not likely to undergo metamorphosis. He has described himself as a “critical friend of Israel” who opposes "blanket boycotts of goods from Israel." As a Euro-liberal he acknowledges Israel's right to self-defense purely in the abstract. For Miliband, even Israel's "right to exist" is implicitly conditioned on its ability to deliver "justice for the Palestinians." No wonder that party hard-liners fixated by the Palestinian Arab cause gravitated to his campaign.
Miliband takes the helm of a party that has always been of two minds about Zionism and Jews, its early association with the urban Jewish working classes notwithstanding. Nowadays, demographic and class shifts – there are fewer Jewish cabbies and more Jewish lawyers – have left Jews without influence in unions and their political loyalties mostly split between Labor and the Tories.
Founded in 1900, Labor began as an amalgamation of the Fabian Society, trade unions and a precursor socialist party. This did not automatically translate into tolerant attitudes toward Jews. The unions, for instance, supported passage of the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at restricting Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia. In 1911, trade unionists carried out a pogrom in Wales that forced out local Jewish merchants. On the other hand, in 1917, Labor warmly championed Jewish settlement in Palestine. And in 1922, Labor sent its first Jewish member, union leader Manny Shinwell, to parliament.
In the dark days before World War II, Labor only grudgingly accepted the necessity of rearmament against Nazi Germany. In opposition in 1944, Labor's platform was friendly toward Zionist aspirations; and in 1945 the party was calling for an end to Britain's heartless barring of Jewish immigration to Palestine.
All that changed within months of Labor's sweeping post-war election victory as foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, a former labor organizer with strong anti-Jewish prejudices, totally embraced the Arab line. The party remained hostile toward the Zionist enterprise until end of mandate and beyond. Paradoxically, this same Labor electoral victory sent an astounding 26 Jews to parliament. But as Prof. Geoffrey Alderman makes clear, not only did they not form a Jewish caucus, only six could be cajoled to venture the slightest public opposition to Bevin's catastrophic Palestine policies.
After Israel's War of Independence, the Labor government petulantly withheld diplomatic recognition until February 1949. Similarly, in 1956, Labor's Jewish MPs, then in opposition, refused to break ranks with party leader Hugh Gaitskell over his nasty criticism of Israel during the Sinai Campaign.
By the 1960s Labor's hard-left factions were on the ascendant. Yet even moderate prime minister Harold Wilson was cold to Israel's entreaties in the lead up to 1967 war. After Labor's 1979 defeat by Margaret Thatcher, the party only barely adjusted its leftward drift replacing Michael Foot with Neil Kinnock. The moderates regained control over the party when Tony Blair led "New Labor" to power in 1997. During Blair's long reign hostility toward Israel – and oftentimes obliquely toward Jews -- by Labor's supporters in the media, unions and academia became viral. Though Blair incessantly lobbied Washington to extract strategically costly diplomatic concessions from Israel during the second intifada, his continuing opposition to the Jewish state's de-legitimization tarred him as a philo-Zionist among leftists.
That era ended in May when Conservative David Cameron defeated Blair's successor Gordon Brown. Now, Miliband's victory makes it official: New Labor is finished.
Miliband is a radical optimist with a pragmatic streak. The new leader's hardheaded assessment may be that Israel-bashing provides few political benefits against an incumbent premier whose lack of empathy for the Zionist enterprise parallels his own.
-- September 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
No Kudos to Castro
Castro's Conversion
I suppose for an entire generation, Fidel Castro is a harmless old baseball fan, and maybe a former principled Latin American revolutionary.
Forgotten is the fact that he tried to instigate a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States that would have cost millions of people their lives – though he's apologized for that, kind of.
And put aside that Castro deprived the people of Cuba of their liberty, tortured opponents and forced hundreds of thousands of Cubans into exile.
Realizing that his days on this earth are numbered and that he will soon go to meet Marx, he is in the process of rehabilitating his image.
And what better way to begin that process than by calling in a liberal Jewish American journalist (and an old Castro-hand, Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations) to have an extended conversation about Jews, Israel and Iran among other things.
The old dictator had read Goldberg's recent Atlantic article which argued – mistakenly in my view – that it was just a matter of time before Israel went to war against Iran to stop the mullahs from deploying atomic weapons.
Castro – now reinventing himself as some kind of humanist -- is all of a sudden worried about the danger of a nuclear conflagration.
So Castro drops Goldberg a couple of nuggets.
Does he think that Israel has a right to exist?
Uncle Fidel answers: "Si, sin ninguna duda" -- "Yes, without a doubt."
Gosh. I'm glad we got that out of the way.
And what about Jews, Goldberg asks? Does Uncle Fidel have a soft spot for Jews?
"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."
Not bad for a guy who kept equating Israelis with Nazis.
And what about Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial?
"The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust," Castro tells Goldberg.
Goldberg: "I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me."
Castro: "I am saying this so you can communicate it."
It gets better.
Now that Castro has dissented from Ahmadinejad, Goldberg reports that Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, has announced that he too, felt great "love and respect" for Jews."
Well, I suppose it's better than a slap in the face.
But let's get down to cases.
I do not like to see Castro air-brushing out the bad he has wrought. He's not getting a pass from me.
Castro is not an anti-Semite in the classical sense. Certainly, as a "dialectical materialist," he rejects Christian-rooted theological Jew-hatred. He admires Jews in history, most prominently Marx.
But his record of warfare – political, diplomatic, and military -- against the Jewish state is damning.
You can't want to snuff-out the Jewish state yet claim to love the Jews.
It would be like saying you love Muslims but want to destroy each and every one of the 57 Muslim states in the world because, maybe you think Islam is just a religion so Muslims don't deserve political states.
What follows is part of what Castro did against the Jewish state. And remember, he had no reason. Israel is on the other side of the world. We never did boo to him.
Castro began to train Palestinian Arab terrorists in Cuba in 1966. Keep in mind that there were no "occupied territories" in those days.
He did not break diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 following the Six Day War along with the rest of the Soviet client states.
He did so only in the wake of 1973 Yom Kippur War at a solidarity with the Palestinians meeting of the so-called non-aligned nations in Algiers.
Cuban military instructors trained Palestinian Arabs gunmen in Middle East countries starting in the 1970s.
That's when the Palestinians patented airline hijacking, slaughtering Olympic athletes and leaving bombs in supermarkets.
You may think 9/11 was the start of the terror campaign against airports around the world. But it was the Palestinian terrorists who got that ball rolling.
Anyway, in 1973 and 1974, Cuban MiG and helicopter pilots were actually based in Syria. I think they even engaged in dogfights with Israeli planes.
Castro granted diplomatic relations to the Palestine Liberation Organization and in 1974 and allowed the PLO to establish an "embassy" in Havana.
Bear in mind that at this stage the PLO did not even claim to recognize Israel or to accept a two-state solution. Nowadays it at least makes believe it does.
But in those days it behaved like Hamas does today.
Still Castro extended his support to a movement dedicated to "liberating" Palestine from the Jews.
In 1974, he stationed a tank brigade on Golan Heights. That same year, as many as 3,000 Cuban soldiers were based in Syria working for Assad I.
This is what Castro said in 1975: "It is no secret to anyone that at any given moment of danger and threat to the Republic of Syria, our men were in Syria."
By 1976, the CIA estimated that 300 Arab fedayeen were training in Cuba.
In 1977, Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (an outfit set up to allow Christian-born Arabs who were Marxists to fight Israel alongside the Muslims) visited Cuba.
All along, mind you, Castro ostensibly claimed to support direct negotiations between parties.
In 1978, he hosted Yasser Arafat and George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Arafat's "state" visit to Havana was to discuss terror training not coexistence with Israel.
Fast forward to 1991: Cuba voted against a U.N. Resolution to revoke the infamous 1975 General Assembly Resolution that the Arabs pushed through besmirching Zionism (the national liberation movement of the Jewish people) as "racism."
In 2001, just as Arafat had launched his second intifada that would claim 1,000 Israeli lives, Castro called on the delegates attending the -- incongruously titled -- U.N. World Conference "Against Racism" in Durban, South Africa to "put an end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people."
"Genocide"???!!
Now, fast forward to …today.
Cuba's Communist Party newspaper still "reports" on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict purely in black and white terms. Hence the headline:
"Palestine Refuses to Negotiate If Israel Resumes Colonization."
Look, I am delighted that Castro is not a Holocaust-denier, these days you can't take anything for granted. But he's still a defamer of Israel.
What would it take for me to bury the hatchet?
I want to see him take responsibility for what he did to Israel all these years.
I want him to stop Cuba from automatically voting with the Arab and Muslim bloc at the UN.
I want him to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
Let him prove that his interview with Goldberg was the substantive beginning of a trend, not just an old commite trying to spin his image.
I suppose for an entire generation, Fidel Castro is a harmless old baseball fan, and maybe a former principled Latin American revolutionary.
Forgotten is the fact that he tried to instigate a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States that would have cost millions of people their lives – though he's apologized for that, kind of.
And put aside that Castro deprived the people of Cuba of their liberty, tortured opponents and forced hundreds of thousands of Cubans into exile.
Realizing that his days on this earth are numbered and that he will soon go to meet Marx, he is in the process of rehabilitating his image.
And what better way to begin that process than by calling in a liberal Jewish American journalist (and an old Castro-hand, Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations) to have an extended conversation about Jews, Israel and Iran among other things.
The old dictator had read Goldberg's recent Atlantic article which argued – mistakenly in my view – that it was just a matter of time before Israel went to war against Iran to stop the mullahs from deploying atomic weapons.
Castro – now reinventing himself as some kind of humanist -- is all of a sudden worried about the danger of a nuclear conflagration.
So Castro drops Goldberg a couple of nuggets.
Does he think that Israel has a right to exist?
Uncle Fidel answers: "Si, sin ninguna duda" -- "Yes, without a doubt."
Gosh. I'm glad we got that out of the way.
And what about Jews, Goldberg asks? Does Uncle Fidel have a soft spot for Jews?
"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."
Not bad for a guy who kept equating Israelis with Nazis.
And what about Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial?
"The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust," Castro tells Goldberg.
Goldberg: "I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me."
Castro: "I am saying this so you can communicate it."
It gets better.
Now that Castro has dissented from Ahmadinejad, Goldberg reports that Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, has announced that he too, felt great "love and respect" for Jews."
Well, I suppose it's better than a slap in the face.
But let's get down to cases.
I do not like to see Castro air-brushing out the bad he has wrought. He's not getting a pass from me.
Castro is not an anti-Semite in the classical sense. Certainly, as a "dialectical materialist," he rejects Christian-rooted theological Jew-hatred. He admires Jews in history, most prominently Marx.
But his record of warfare – political, diplomatic, and military -- against the Jewish state is damning.
You can't want to snuff-out the Jewish state yet claim to love the Jews.
It would be like saying you love Muslims but want to destroy each and every one of the 57 Muslim states in the world because, maybe you think Islam is just a religion so Muslims don't deserve political states.
What follows is part of what Castro did against the Jewish state. And remember, he had no reason. Israel is on the other side of the world. We never did boo to him.
Castro began to train Palestinian Arab terrorists in Cuba in 1966. Keep in mind that there were no "occupied territories" in those days.
He did not break diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 following the Six Day War along with the rest of the Soviet client states.
He did so only in the wake of 1973 Yom Kippur War at a solidarity with the Palestinians meeting of the so-called non-aligned nations in Algiers.
Cuban military instructors trained Palestinian Arabs gunmen in Middle East countries starting in the 1970s.
That's when the Palestinians patented airline hijacking, slaughtering Olympic athletes and leaving bombs in supermarkets.
You may think 9/11 was the start of the terror campaign against airports around the world. But it was the Palestinian terrorists who got that ball rolling.
Anyway, in 1973 and 1974, Cuban MiG and helicopter pilots were actually based in Syria. I think they even engaged in dogfights with Israeli planes.
Castro granted diplomatic relations to the Palestine Liberation Organization and in 1974 and allowed the PLO to establish an "embassy" in Havana.
Bear in mind that at this stage the PLO did not even claim to recognize Israel or to accept a two-state solution. Nowadays it at least makes believe it does.
But in those days it behaved like Hamas does today.
Still Castro extended his support to a movement dedicated to "liberating" Palestine from the Jews.
In 1974, he stationed a tank brigade on Golan Heights. That same year, as many as 3,000 Cuban soldiers were based in Syria working for Assad I.
This is what Castro said in 1975: "It is no secret to anyone that at any given moment of danger and threat to the Republic of Syria, our men were in Syria."
By 1976, the CIA estimated that 300 Arab fedayeen were training in Cuba.
In 1977, Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (an outfit set up to allow Christian-born Arabs who were Marxists to fight Israel alongside the Muslims) visited Cuba.
All along, mind you, Castro ostensibly claimed to support direct negotiations between parties.
In 1978, he hosted Yasser Arafat and George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Arafat's "state" visit to Havana was to discuss terror training not coexistence with Israel.
Fast forward to 1991: Cuba voted against a U.N. Resolution to revoke the infamous 1975 General Assembly Resolution that the Arabs pushed through besmirching Zionism (the national liberation movement of the Jewish people) as "racism."
In 2001, just as Arafat had launched his second intifada that would claim 1,000 Israeli lives, Castro called on the delegates attending the -- incongruously titled -- U.N. World Conference "Against Racism" in Durban, South Africa to "put an end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people."
"Genocide"???!!
Now, fast forward to …today.
Cuba's Communist Party newspaper still "reports" on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict purely in black and white terms. Hence the headline:
"Palestine Refuses to Negotiate If Israel Resumes Colonization."
Look, I am delighted that Castro is not a Holocaust-denier, these days you can't take anything for granted. But he's still a defamer of Israel.
What would it take for me to bury the hatchet?
I want to see him take responsibility for what he did to Israel all these years.
I want him to stop Cuba from automatically voting with the Arab and Muslim bloc at the UN.
I want him to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
Let him prove that his interview with Goldberg was the substantive beginning of a trend, not just an old commite trying to spin his image.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, September 27, 2010
REBRANDING POLAND
How should Jews think of Poland?
As Israel's best friend in the European Union, according to the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and the Polish Institute for International Affairs, organizers of a recent [September 19-20] Jerusalem conference which marked the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries twenty years ago.
It is time, they emphatically say, to take a more nuanced view of Poland; to obsess less about the killing fields implanted on Polish soil by Nazi Germany and reflect more broadly on the preceding 1,000 years of Jewish civilization.
It's not an easy sell. The image framed by Polish-born former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir of Poles imbibing anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk persists. The reasons are plain.
Before a single Nazi boot set foot in Poland, Jewish college students had been obliged to sit on segregated classroom benches. By 1937 a "cold pogrom" had systematically eliminated Jews from Polish economic life. There is Jedwabne, where in July 1941, 1,600 Jews were burned alive in a barn by local Poles before the Nazis could lay hands on them. There is the 1946 pogrom in Kielce which claimed the lives of 42 Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
Moreover, Communist Poland's post World War II record toward Jews and Israel is also spotty. To its credit, Poland allowed the Haganah to set up a military training camp and was among the first to recognize Israel's independence. On the other hand, when Stalin's policy shifted against Israel so did Poland's. By 1953 Israeli diplomats had been declared persona non grata.
The elevation of Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1956 improved matters. Relations remained muted, but Polish authorities permitted tens of thousands of Jews to make aliya. However, with the 1967 Six Day War, Gomulka not only broke diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, anti-Semitism again became an element of domestic propaganda. In the 1970s low level trade ties with Israel resumed. By 1986, as the party began having doubts about the permanence of the Soviet empire, Poland sought improved relations with Israel in the transparent hope of impressing the U.S. "Jewish lobby" and thereby swaying Washington.
Momentously, relations between democratic Poland and Israel were re-established shortly after the communists lost power. Since then Warsaw has gone to great lengths to rebrand its image among Jews. When the Soviets allowed indirect Jewish immigration to Israel, Poland in 1990 crucially provided a clandestine staging area enabling 100,000 souls to reach Zion. In 1995, Poland created the post of minister plenipotentiary for Polish-Jewish relations.
Over the years, President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were all welcomed in Poland. Jewish travelers describe a country whose elites genuinely want to turn over a new leaf. Israeli and Jewish authors are prominently featured in bookstores. Kletzmer music is all the rage. A renewal of Jewish life is underway. And a Jewish museum is under construction in Warsaw.
Annual trade between Poland and Israel stands at $500 million. Polish entrepreneurs seek to invest in Israeli hi-tech; Israelis are active in Polish real estate. Israeli-owned companies are a presence in Poland. Teva ranks as the number two pharmaceutical firm there.
Israeli analysts assert that Poland has become an invaluable diplomatic asset to Israel within the EU -- siding with Jerusalem against the tainted Goldstone Report; refusing to participate in the Durban II conference; derailing a Swedish initiative on Jerusalem inimical to Israeli interests, and as Europe's leading voice against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's despicable Holocaust denial. Deepening Israel-Polish security cooperation has become a further element in the relationship. And in November relations are to be taken to an unprecedented level when Poland's top leadership echelon is expected to arrive in Israel for inter-ministerial meetings.
All Poland asks in return is for Israelis to see it with fresh eyes and to influence other Jews to do so as well. Not to ignore the ignoble aspects of Polish history, but to place them in the context of a very long, at times positive, and always complex relationship. For some Jews – influenced less by realpolitik than by painful memories – this may be asking too much.
September 2010
As Israel's best friend in the European Union, according to the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and the Polish Institute for International Affairs, organizers of a recent [September 19-20] Jerusalem conference which marked the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries twenty years ago.
It is time, they emphatically say, to take a more nuanced view of Poland; to obsess less about the killing fields implanted on Polish soil by Nazi Germany and reflect more broadly on the preceding 1,000 years of Jewish civilization.
It's not an easy sell. The image framed by Polish-born former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir of Poles imbibing anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk persists. The reasons are plain.
Before a single Nazi boot set foot in Poland, Jewish college students had been obliged to sit on segregated classroom benches. By 1937 a "cold pogrom" had systematically eliminated Jews from Polish economic life. There is Jedwabne, where in July 1941, 1,600 Jews were burned alive in a barn by local Poles before the Nazis could lay hands on them. There is the 1946 pogrom in Kielce which claimed the lives of 42 Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
Moreover, Communist Poland's post World War II record toward Jews and Israel is also spotty. To its credit, Poland allowed the Haganah to set up a military training camp and was among the first to recognize Israel's independence. On the other hand, when Stalin's policy shifted against Israel so did Poland's. By 1953 Israeli diplomats had been declared persona non grata.
The elevation of Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1956 improved matters. Relations remained muted, but Polish authorities permitted tens of thousands of Jews to make aliya. However, with the 1967 Six Day War, Gomulka not only broke diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, anti-Semitism again became an element of domestic propaganda. In the 1970s low level trade ties with Israel resumed. By 1986, as the party began having doubts about the permanence of the Soviet empire, Poland sought improved relations with Israel in the transparent hope of impressing the U.S. "Jewish lobby" and thereby swaying Washington.
Momentously, relations between democratic Poland and Israel were re-established shortly after the communists lost power. Since then Warsaw has gone to great lengths to rebrand its image among Jews. When the Soviets allowed indirect Jewish immigration to Israel, Poland in 1990 crucially provided a clandestine staging area enabling 100,000 souls to reach Zion. In 1995, Poland created the post of minister plenipotentiary for Polish-Jewish relations.
Over the years, President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were all welcomed in Poland. Jewish travelers describe a country whose elites genuinely want to turn over a new leaf. Israeli and Jewish authors are prominently featured in bookstores. Kletzmer music is all the rage. A renewal of Jewish life is underway. And a Jewish museum is under construction in Warsaw.
Annual trade between Poland and Israel stands at $500 million. Polish entrepreneurs seek to invest in Israeli hi-tech; Israelis are active in Polish real estate. Israeli-owned companies are a presence in Poland. Teva ranks as the number two pharmaceutical firm there.
Israeli analysts assert that Poland has become an invaluable diplomatic asset to Israel within the EU -- siding with Jerusalem against the tainted Goldstone Report; refusing to participate in the Durban II conference; derailing a Swedish initiative on Jerusalem inimical to Israeli interests, and as Europe's leading voice against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's despicable Holocaust denial. Deepening Israel-Polish security cooperation has become a further element in the relationship. And in November relations are to be taken to an unprecedented level when Poland's top leadership echelon is expected to arrive in Israel for inter-ministerial meetings.
All Poland asks in return is for Israelis to see it with fresh eyes and to influence other Jews to do so as well. Not to ignore the ignoble aspects of Polish history, but to place them in the context of a very long, at times positive, and always complex relationship. For some Jews – influenced less by realpolitik than by painful memories – this may be asking too much.
September 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
London's Jewish Museum
The next time you are in London, make it a point to visit the Jewish Museum .
I was there over the Rosh Hashana holidays. The museum is located near two Northern Line tube stations in Camden Town. It is new, open, sunny and not overwhelming.
I started out on the top floor which is showing a temporary exhibit of illuminated Hebrew manuscripts some of which were on loan from the Vatican -- which I know begs the questions: where did they get them from? And several others which came from various British universities.
Most are of Jewish interest though some are also of Christian interest.
The exhibit which ends on October 10 is modest in size -- as is the museum, but worthwhile.
Downstairs is a permanent installation on British Jewish History. Just the right amount of explanation...audio visual ... and artifacts.
Jews first came to England in 1066. I learned that the first blood libel took place in Norwich in 1144.
And that Jews were forced to wear distinctive badges.
In 1290 the Jews of England were expelled. That explains why Shakespeare who died in 1616 could not have come across many Jews.
The Jews were allowed to return to England in 1656.
By 1855 there was a Jewish Lord Sheriff.
In 1858 Rothschild was allowed to be sworn in on a Hebrew bible as a member of Parliament.
In the 1880s England experienced a great immigration. This coincided with the pogroms on Russia. The East End became a major Jewish neighborhood -- like New York's Lower East Side. So Jews were big in Whitechapel.
I learned further that Jewish women did piece work: making cigarettes and were paid 2 shillings and sixpence for 1,000. The tools they used were on display.
At their economic situation improved, the Jews moved to better neighborhoods like Stoke Newington.
Between the wars there was upward mobility and that is how it transpired that many Jews became cabbies in London. Yiddish was out and English was in.
In 1938-39 the community took in some 10,000 children from Europe ...rescued from Hitler's clutches.
On the main floor there is a general exhibit on Judaism which I thought was very well done. Plenty of good explanations for beginners. There is also a small Holocaust section anchored to a British Jewish citizens who found himself in Europe and survived the Holocaust.
Israel does not feature prominently -- but it does feature -- in the museum; this is not a museum about Israel. It is mostly aimed at British people including non-Jews.
There is a gift shop and a cafeteria which sells sandwiches (kosher + meat) and soups as well as hot drinks. A bit overpriced for my budget but pleasant.
I was there over the Rosh Hashana holidays. The museum is located near two Northern Line tube stations in Camden Town. It is new, open, sunny and not overwhelming.
I started out on the top floor which is showing a temporary exhibit of illuminated Hebrew manuscripts some of which were on loan from the Vatican -- which I know begs the questions: where did they get them from? And several others which came from various British universities.
Most are of Jewish interest though some are also of Christian interest.
The exhibit which ends on October 10 is modest in size -- as is the museum, but worthwhile.
Downstairs is a permanent installation on British Jewish History. Just the right amount of explanation...audio visual ... and artifacts.
Jews first came to England in 1066. I learned that the first blood libel took place in Norwich in 1144.
And that Jews were forced to wear distinctive badges.
In 1290 the Jews of England were expelled. That explains why Shakespeare who died in 1616 could not have come across many Jews.
The Jews were allowed to return to England in 1656.
By 1855 there was a Jewish Lord Sheriff.
In 1858 Rothschild was allowed to be sworn in on a Hebrew bible as a member of Parliament.
In the 1880s England experienced a great immigration. This coincided with the pogroms on Russia. The East End became a major Jewish neighborhood -- like New York's Lower East Side. So Jews were big in Whitechapel.
I learned further that Jewish women did piece work: making cigarettes and were paid 2 shillings and sixpence for 1,000. The tools they used were on display.
At their economic situation improved, the Jews moved to better neighborhoods like Stoke Newington.
Between the wars there was upward mobility and that is how it transpired that many Jews became cabbies in London. Yiddish was out and English was in.
In 1938-39 the community took in some 10,000 children from Europe ...rescued from Hitler's clutches.
On the main floor there is a general exhibit on Judaism which I thought was very well done. Plenty of good explanations for beginners. There is also a small Holocaust section anchored to a British Jewish citizens who found himself in Europe and survived the Holocaust.
Israel does not feature prominently -- but it does feature -- in the museum; this is not a museum about Israel. It is mostly aimed at British people including non-Jews.
There is a gift shop and a cafeteria which sells sandwiches (kosher + meat) and soups as well as hot drinks. A bit overpriced for my budget but pleasant.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
The British Elections: Tory v. Labor - April 2010
Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace yesterday to ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament on April 12. New elections will take place on May 6. At the moment, the Conservative party under David Cameron is leading Brown's Labor party in the polls; the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg, are in a strong third position.
The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.
As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies.
What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.
Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.
Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."
Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.
Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.
Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.
The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.
As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies.
What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.
Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.
Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."
Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.
Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.
Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Israel & India
Celebrating its Independence Day on August 15, the nation of India marked 63 years since the end of British rule in the sub-continent. In light of the two countries' more or less contemporaneous struggle for self-determination in the immediate aftermath of World War II, one might have thought that India would establish close ties with the newly born state of Israel straightaway. It did not happen
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.
India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.
In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.
Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.
But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.
And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.
So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India saw itself as a leader of the "non-aligned" bloc, and Israel as part of the West. Notwithstanding its conflict with Pakistan, its overwhelmingly Muslim neighbor, New Delhi also sought to establish itself on good terms with the Arab and Islamic world. To that end, it wholeheartedly adopted the Arab line at the UN and mapped out third-world strategy with Egypt's Gamal Nasser.
When it came to Jewish history and Zionist aspirations, India's founding elites labored under profound misapprehensions. In late 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht, Mohandas Gandhi wrote that he had no sympathy for the idea of a Jewish return to Zion. His advice to desperate and despairing European Jews was to face the Nazis with passivity; to the Jews in Palestine, he counseled an effort to convert Arab pogromists into friends.
India did finally recognize Israel in 1950, allowing Jerusalem to maintain a consular presence in Mumbai (then Bombay). But not until 1992 were full diplomatic relations established. By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed; Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was working feverishly on an Islamic bomb; and Egypt had long since made its peace with Israel.
In the years since then, the two countries have gradually drawn closer. Israelis are unabashedly smitten with India: about 35,000 of them, including many youngsters just out of army service, visit the country each year. Annual trade, which started at $200 million, has by now reached $3.5 billion, and this year India surpassed Europe as Israel's number-two export market (after the U.S.). Israel sells India minerals, fertilizer, chemicals, electronics, and, most significantly, military equipmemt.
Since the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, security ties have also strengthened. Reportedly, the two countries are jointly developing a medium-range air-defense system. The Indian navy has visited Haifa port, and India has launched commercial satellites into orbit for Israel.
But then there is Iran, on which Delhi and Jerusalem are at cross-purposes. Iran is India's second biggest oil supplier, and India—competing with China in a race to dominate the world's economy—is heavily invested in Iran's energy sector. India-Iran trade has reportedly tripled in the past five years. Geopolitics plays a role as well: India imagines Iran can be persuaded to dampen Islamist extremism in the sub-continent and curb Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan.
And there are also the cold facts of demography. True, Israel's population of seven million includes 70,000 Indian Jews—but India is a vast, multiethnic country of a billion people, and its Muslim minority, 13 percent of the population, numbers 153 million, exceeding the combined populations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Second only to Iran, India has the largest non-Arab Shi'ite population in the world. It is notable that Indian Muslims have no history of involvement in terrorism, and their religious authorities abjure political violence. Nor is India as a whole troubled by indigenous anti-Jewish sentiment. Still, the country's elites are thoroughly exposed to the prevailing global fault-finding of Israel and the concomitant rise in global anti-Semitism.
So the Israel-India relationship, while mutually vital, is delicate. Jerusalem would emphatically prefer New Delhi to stop enabling Iran, even as it must appreciate that India will calibrate its relationships according to its interests as it sees them. Under the circumstances, the question is what it would take to convince Indians that appeasing the imperialist mullahs in Tehran will in fact undermine India's long-term welfare and national interests.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Meeting Abigail Green
I understand that you are related to your subject Moses Montefiore?
Yes. He was my great great great great great uncle.
Tell us a bit about your own background.
I was born and bred in London, and since my father isn't Jewish and my mother's family have been here for 200 years that makes me a very English Jew. My mother was brought up in the Sephardi congregation, but she didn't feel she could stay after she married out, and so she joined West London Synagogue which, ironically, is the Reform synagogue Montefiore's brother Horatio helped to found. My husband's Sephardi too, so we got married in the Sephardi synagogue at Bevis Marks. The rabbi was delighted!
When did you decide to write this book?
About 10 years ago. Of course I had always known about Montefiore, but I became intrigued by him as a historical figure when working as a research assistant for Niall Ferguson's History of the House of Rothschild.
Where do you do most of your writing?
I wrote the first half of the book in my office at Brasenose [Oxford University], but when I became a mother I began working at home when my daughter napped.
Is this your first book?
No. My first book was Fatherlands: State-building and Nationhood in Nineteenth Century Germany about identity formation in non-Prussian Germany during the pre-unification period (to c. 1870). Jews did not feature at all, which may be one reason why I wrote this book.
What is your next project?
I'm still narrowing it down, but probably something to do with 19th century humanitarianism.
Let's talk a bit about Montefiore the man. Would he be someone you would enjoy having at your Shabbat dinner table? What was he like?
He was well known for his old-fashioned courtesy so I'm sure he would have been a great Shabbat guest. And of course he was striking -- well over 6 ft even in old age, [though] his dress sense remained stuck in the 1820s.
I always imagined him sounding a bit like my grandfather. I can tell from the way he transliterated Hebrew words in his diary that he pronounced them in exactly the same way.
As to what he was like, I suspect that changed over time. Judith [his wife] liked him, and since I never came across anyone with a bad word to say about her I think we have to take that seriously. He was probably much more fun in his 20s and 30s, when he made friends with some really interesting (if earnest) characters. But as he became older he inevitably became much more rigid. Perhaps he made up for it by having so many interesting stories to tell.
Was it religious fervor that drove his vehement opposition to the establishment of a Reform congregation in London?
No, it was also about keeping the Sephardi community together – I think in many ways that was more important. Almost all the reformers came from Bevis Marks and most of them were Montefiore's relatives, so it was a very bitter thing.
What would it have been like to travel with Montefiore?
To begin with Montefiore and Judith only took a couple of servants with them, and they weren't particular about keeping kosher (although they seem to have avoided bacon). That changed as they became more religious, and after 1846 Montefiore never travelled anywhere without his own shochet. A lot depended on where he was travelling. When he visited Morocco in 1864, he took the train most of the way through France and Spain so he didn't need a lot of people with him, but it was very unusual for Europeans to travel in the Moroccan interior and he crossed the desert from Essaouira to Marrakesh with an entourage of well over a hundred.
Was there a pattern to the type of women Montefiore sought out for his dalliances?
We only have names for two of them, so it's hard to generalize. But neither were Jewish, which I think is not surprising. One was married and the other was a servant. Family legend has it that there were lots of Montefiore "by-blows" [offspring of unmarried parents] wandering round Ramsgate and its surroundings, so I tend to think he dallied with the lower orders -- which would have been very Victorian.
Could you explain why the bulk of the records of this obsessively organized man -- his logs, his meticulous files -- came to be burned upon his demise by a rabbi acting under instructions of Montefiore's nephew Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore?
No one really knows, but I find it hard to believe that Montefiore himself ordered it after taking so much trouble over his paperwork.
Was someone trying to protect his reputation?
George Collard, who claims to be an illegitimate descendant of Montefiore’s, likes to think that there was material relating to illegitimate offspring among the papers that were destroyed. Perhaps, but the surviving Montefiore diaries do not contain any kind of intimate information and it is by no means clear that he would have kept a record of any affaires of the heart.
On the other hand, Montefiore’s correspondence would have contained a great many very mundane letters of little interest to anyone. I find it more probable that Montefiore’s nephew simply couldn’t see the point of most of it – especially since so much would have been in languages he could not understand. He certainly made sure that those documents that did survive were those of most interest to him -- his own letters to Montefiore, a diary entry relating to his marriage, material relating to the Damascus Affair, correspondence with the great and good of the non-Jewish world.
How did Montefiore become a Jewish celebrity on a global scale?
That's a big question. People like Dona Gracia and Moses Mendelssohn had big reputations in the parts of the Jewish world, and Shabbatai Zevi managed to bridge the Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide. But I think Montefiore was the first global Jewish celebrity because this was a more global age and because he was also a celebrity in the non-Jewish world. Imperialism and the communications revolution (press,
telegraph, steam and rail) were probably the most important underlying factors.
What distinguished him from the "court Jews" of an earlier era?
The key difference was that he was out in the open. In 1846 a Russian Hassid suggested he should just have bribed the government to improve the situation of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, which would have been the traditional way of doing things; Montefiore was appalled because his whole approach was about honorable publicity.
What was his biggest miscalculation as a Jewish leader?
Travelling to St. Petersburg to congratulate Alexander II on the bicentenary of Peter the Great in the aftermath of the Odessa pogrom of 1872.
And his biggest achievement?
The firman of 1840 [decree issued by the Sultan decrying the false blood libels] was his single greatest achievement, but his achievements as a mobilizer -- of money and public opinion -- were more significant in the long run.
How would you characterize his answer to the perennial "Jewish question"?
I think it changed over time. To begin with, he looked to gradual emancipation and social integration which is why he tried to get Jews in Russia and Turkey to learn Russian and Ottoman, but by the 1880s this was looking increasingly unrealistic in places like Russia and Romania, and even in Western Europe the situation was coming unstuck. That's why he supported the early Zionists and put his faith in the messiah.
Is it remotely conceivable that a leader of his stature and style could arise and wield comparable influence today?
No. The Jewish world is much, much more divided now than it ever was in Montefiore's time -- then it was still possible for one man to speak to a multitude of different religious and cultural constituencies in the same voice.
###ENDS###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Violent Diversions
Time and again troubles in the Arab world have increased the chances of violence against Israel. Case in point: Hezbollah's assassination of Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, the country's chief Sunni figure, on February 14, 2005, resulted in a period of severe political pressure on the Shi'ite movement. Its Syrian ally, presumed complicit in the murder, was compelled to withdraw its forces from the country. Only when the Islamist group sent its gunmen across the border into Israel on July 12, 2006 seizing two Israeli soldiers and sparking a 34-day conflagration was attention diverted from the crime. Hezbollah bought the time it needed to solidify its position as the ultimate domestic arbiter of Lebanese politics.
Now, with the Special Tribunal For Lebanon reportedly poised to finger senior Hezbollah operative Mustafa Badr al-Din for carrying out the Hariri murder, will Hassan Nasrallah again seek to draw attention away from his movement's culpability with a diversionary attack against Israel? This time there is less incentive to do so. He has already preempted the panel by predicting that his men were about to be traduced. Syria, like Hezbollah a client of Iran, has brazenly demanded that the Hariri investigation be shut down because identifying Hariri's killers would threaten Lebanon's stability. Sunni powers are capitulating to the Syrian and Hezbollah intimidation.
Saudi King Abdullah, patron to the slain Hariri as well as his son, current Prime Minister Saad Hariri, travelled to Beirut on the same plane as Syrian President Bashar Assad in a symbolic push for Lebanese unity during an hours-long "summit." An Arab analyst close to the Hariri camp intuited that Syria had offered to "protect" the surviving Hariri in return for quashing the indictment against his Hezbollah killer. The son, who once openly blamed Assad for murdering his father, has sensibly concluded the neither Washington, Europe nor the Sunni Arab powers are prepared to stand up to Hezbollah, Damascus or Tehran. Consequently, the younger Hariri has pledged homage to Assad.
With Sunnis and Shi'ites working in tandem to cover-up the Hariri assassination in a bid to calm Lebanese tensions, Israeli analysts rate the prospect of a "diversionary" attack from the north as low.
Turning to the south, divisions among the Palestinians have been contributing to a heating up the Gaza front. The Palestinian Authority has come under intense pressure from Washington to enter into direct negotiations with the Netanyahu government. In interviews with the Israeli media, PA negotiator Saeb Erekat has taken to lobbying the Israeli public to justify the Palestinian refusal to talk. Erekat explained that Mahmoud Abbas has submitted "far-reaching" proposals on final-status issues -- borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water and security -- to U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell and is waiting to hear a positive response from Israel. Washington, however, has apparently advised the PA that it will not be able to further assist the Palestinians in establishing a state if they continue to reject talking directly to Israel.
Against this background, over the weekend a Grad missile fired from Gaza slammed into Ashkelon, and Kassam rockets smashed into Sapir College in the western Negev. Fortunately, no one was hurt in either attack.
By striking across the border – or looking the other way as global jihadist launch their rockets on Eilat – Hamas may be trying to instigate an Israeli retaliation that it can portray as an "atrocity" or "war crime" thereby inhibiting an anyway hesitant Ramallah from participating in genuine give-and-take bargaining with Israel. Past experience is worth recalling: Hamas first gained infamy with a bus bombing in April 1993 intended to thwart the Oslo Accords signed anyway five months later. In the course of 1995 and 1996 Hamas's cold-blooded bombing campaigns were aimed at torpedoing Oslo's implementation.
Hezbollah has acknowledged miscalculating the force of Israel’s reaction to previous Islamist aggression. Hamas has been less publicly self-critical about the repercussions of its violent adventurism. What would happen if the next rocket from Gaza were to strike a crowded shopping mall or playground? The risks notwithstanding, chances are Hamas's will continue its noxious efforts to foil an anyway hobbled peace process.
-- August 2010
Now, with the Special Tribunal For Lebanon reportedly poised to finger senior Hezbollah operative Mustafa Badr al-Din for carrying out the Hariri murder, will Hassan Nasrallah again seek to draw attention away from his movement's culpability with a diversionary attack against Israel? This time there is less incentive to do so. He has already preempted the panel by predicting that his men were about to be traduced. Syria, like Hezbollah a client of Iran, has brazenly demanded that the Hariri investigation be shut down because identifying Hariri's killers would threaten Lebanon's stability. Sunni powers are capitulating to the Syrian and Hezbollah intimidation.
Saudi King Abdullah, patron to the slain Hariri as well as his son, current Prime Minister Saad Hariri, travelled to Beirut on the same plane as Syrian President Bashar Assad in a symbolic push for Lebanese unity during an hours-long "summit." An Arab analyst close to the Hariri camp intuited that Syria had offered to "protect" the surviving Hariri in return for quashing the indictment against his Hezbollah killer. The son, who once openly blamed Assad for murdering his father, has sensibly concluded the neither Washington, Europe nor the Sunni Arab powers are prepared to stand up to Hezbollah, Damascus or Tehran. Consequently, the younger Hariri has pledged homage to Assad.
With Sunnis and Shi'ites working in tandem to cover-up the Hariri assassination in a bid to calm Lebanese tensions, Israeli analysts rate the prospect of a "diversionary" attack from the north as low.
Turning to the south, divisions among the Palestinians have been contributing to a heating up the Gaza front. The Palestinian Authority has come under intense pressure from Washington to enter into direct negotiations with the Netanyahu government. In interviews with the Israeli media, PA negotiator Saeb Erekat has taken to lobbying the Israeli public to justify the Palestinian refusal to talk. Erekat explained that Mahmoud Abbas has submitted "far-reaching" proposals on final-status issues -- borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water and security -- to U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell and is waiting to hear a positive response from Israel. Washington, however, has apparently advised the PA that it will not be able to further assist the Palestinians in establishing a state if they continue to reject talking directly to Israel.
Against this background, over the weekend a Grad missile fired from Gaza slammed into Ashkelon, and Kassam rockets smashed into Sapir College in the western Negev. Fortunately, no one was hurt in either attack.
By striking across the border – or looking the other way as global jihadist launch their rockets on Eilat – Hamas may be trying to instigate an Israeli retaliation that it can portray as an "atrocity" or "war crime" thereby inhibiting an anyway hesitant Ramallah from participating in genuine give-and-take bargaining with Israel. Past experience is worth recalling: Hamas first gained infamy with a bus bombing in April 1993 intended to thwart the Oslo Accords signed anyway five months later. In the course of 1995 and 1996 Hamas's cold-blooded bombing campaigns were aimed at torpedoing Oslo's implementation.
Hezbollah has acknowledged miscalculating the force of Israel’s reaction to previous Islamist aggression. Hamas has been less publicly self-critical about the repercussions of its violent adventurism. What would happen if the next rocket from Gaza were to strike a crowded shopping mall or playground? The risks notwithstanding, chances are Hamas's will continue its noxious efforts to foil an anyway hobbled peace process.
-- August 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Waiting for a Political Messiah
Israelis are not scheduled to go to the polls until October 2013 though no one would be astonished if some political upheaval forced new elections to be held earlier.
Several high profile contenders are already letting it be known that they could be enticed to provide the political deliverance Israelis habitually crave – either by starting new parties or taking leadership roles in existing ones. The saviors waiting in the wings include the photogenic television personality Yair Lapid, who is promising to stand up to the "settlers" and "ultra-Orthodox." His late father, Tommy Lapid, trail blazed a similar path.
Then there is the magnetic Aryeh Deri, once the top vote-getter of the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Shas party and now staking out a politically centrist position. Lastly, though this hardly exhausts the list, is Dan Halutz. Feeling unappreciated, he belatedly resigned as IDF Chief of General Staff in 2007 in the wake of official criticism over his handling of the Second Lebanon War.
Perhaps more than voters in other Western democracies Israelis go to the polls with a smorgasbord of choices. The country's proportional representation system encourages new parties to crop up all the time. Why? Because "winning" a parliamentary seat requires crossing an electoral threshold set at a mere 1.5 percent of the total vote (1% until 1992). The proliferation of parties means that all Israeli governments have been based on coalitions; no single party has ever achieved an outright majority in the 120-member Knesset.
In the country's early years, elections were essentially competitions among left-wing parties for supremacy, and mostly won by Mapai (a precursor to today's Labor). Only in 1977, with the victory of the right-wing Likud party did power become more diffuse – though the basic rules of the political game remained the same. Minor parties continued to come and go impelled by personality clashes within existing parties, ethnic or religious grievances, or demands for ideological rigidity. Two with an atypical shelf-life were Ratz which broke away from Labor in 1973 to champion a more dovish security line and eventually morphed into today's Meretz, and Shas which quit the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox amalgamation in 1984 to become a Sephardi powerbase.
As early as 1976, however, voters were looking for a viable major party alternative to Labor and Likud. Liberal voters in particular were dejected over Labor's often corrupt stranglehold on power, yet were uncomfortable with Likud's perceived stridency about the West Bank. The Democratic Movement for Change, founded by archeologist and soldier Yigael Yadin met their yen for a "third-way" that backed a pragmatic middle ground. But Yadin's party fragmented and by 1981 he had retired from politics.
Still other third way aspirants appeared: The Centre party, founded by general Yitzhak Mordechai (1996), and Avigdor Kahalani's Third Way Party (1996), actually mostly a single-issue movement committed to retaining the Golan Heights. In 1999, columnist Tommy Lapid – Yair's father -- captured the third way mantle in a big way with his Shinui ("Change") party, that presented itself as secular and centrist, but which achieved most of its traction by lambasting (sometimes tastelessly) perceived ultra-Orthodox religious coercion in the public square. By 2006, this party, too, had devoured itself in internecine power struggles.
Then came Kadima founded in 2005 by Ariel Sharon – ostensibly as a third way movement – and bringing together politicians from both Labor and Likud. In reality, the party was a necessary vehicle for Sharon who had repeatedly failed to obtain Likud support for his determination to disengage from the Gaza Strip. In any case, Israeli third way movements have been closely tied to the personalities of their leaders whether Yadin, Lapid or a rebranded Sharon.
This fixation with new personalities and parties promising change continues. Political scientists have called for, and politicians have even paid lip-service to, restructuring the current hyper-pluralist political system beginning with electoral reform. This would weaken the power of parties whose commitments are to ethnic, religious or single-issue causes rather than to broader societal interests. Alas, the present system is designed to perpetuate itself. Even David Ben-Gurion could not pull off electoral reform back in the 1950s – which goes a long way toward explaining Israelis' fascination with ephemeral political saviors.
-- July 2010
Several high profile contenders are already letting it be known that they could be enticed to provide the political deliverance Israelis habitually crave – either by starting new parties or taking leadership roles in existing ones. The saviors waiting in the wings include the photogenic television personality Yair Lapid, who is promising to stand up to the "settlers" and "ultra-Orthodox." His late father, Tommy Lapid, trail blazed a similar path.
Then there is the magnetic Aryeh Deri, once the top vote-getter of the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox Shas party and now staking out a politically centrist position. Lastly, though this hardly exhausts the list, is Dan Halutz. Feeling unappreciated, he belatedly resigned as IDF Chief of General Staff in 2007 in the wake of official criticism over his handling of the Second Lebanon War.
Perhaps more than voters in other Western democracies Israelis go to the polls with a smorgasbord of choices. The country's proportional representation system encourages new parties to crop up all the time. Why? Because "winning" a parliamentary seat requires crossing an electoral threshold set at a mere 1.5 percent of the total vote (1% until 1992). The proliferation of parties means that all Israeli governments have been based on coalitions; no single party has ever achieved an outright majority in the 120-member Knesset.
In the country's early years, elections were essentially competitions among left-wing parties for supremacy, and mostly won by Mapai (a precursor to today's Labor). Only in 1977, with the victory of the right-wing Likud party did power become more diffuse – though the basic rules of the political game remained the same. Minor parties continued to come and go impelled by personality clashes within existing parties, ethnic or religious grievances, or demands for ideological rigidity. Two with an atypical shelf-life were Ratz which broke away from Labor in 1973 to champion a more dovish security line and eventually morphed into today's Meretz, and Shas which quit the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox amalgamation in 1984 to become a Sephardi powerbase.
As early as 1976, however, voters were looking for a viable major party alternative to Labor and Likud. Liberal voters in particular were dejected over Labor's often corrupt stranglehold on power, yet were uncomfortable with Likud's perceived stridency about the West Bank. The Democratic Movement for Change, founded by archeologist and soldier Yigael Yadin met their yen for a "third-way" that backed a pragmatic middle ground. But Yadin's party fragmented and by 1981 he had retired from politics.
Still other third way aspirants appeared: The Centre party, founded by general Yitzhak Mordechai (1996), and Avigdor Kahalani's Third Way Party (1996), actually mostly a single-issue movement committed to retaining the Golan Heights. In 1999, columnist Tommy Lapid – Yair's father -- captured the third way mantle in a big way with his Shinui ("Change") party, that presented itself as secular and centrist, but which achieved most of its traction by lambasting (sometimes tastelessly) perceived ultra-Orthodox religious coercion in the public square. By 2006, this party, too, had devoured itself in internecine power struggles.
Then came Kadima founded in 2005 by Ariel Sharon – ostensibly as a third way movement – and bringing together politicians from both Labor and Likud. In reality, the party was a necessary vehicle for Sharon who had repeatedly failed to obtain Likud support for his determination to disengage from the Gaza Strip. In any case, Israeli third way movements have been closely tied to the personalities of their leaders whether Yadin, Lapid or a rebranded Sharon.
This fixation with new personalities and parties promising change continues. Political scientists have called for, and politicians have even paid lip-service to, restructuring the current hyper-pluralist political system beginning with electoral reform. This would weaken the power of parties whose commitments are to ethnic, religious or single-issue causes rather than to broader societal interests. Alas, the present system is designed to perpetuate itself. Even David Ben-Gurion could not pull off electoral reform back in the 1950s – which goes a long way toward explaining Israelis' fascination with ephemeral political saviors.
-- July 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Israel's Mossad
Israel's successful deployment last week of its fourth orbiting spy satellite, Ofek 9, is being lauded by the country's intelligence community for delivering better than expected surveillance images of "areas of interest." At the same time, Israel's human intelligence apparatus, as essential as ever to the Jewish state's survival, has come under mounting criticism for the blow-back of two of its recent missions: the presumed liquidation of senior Hamas operative Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai, and the Israel navy's unpreparedness in the interdiction of the Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla. Meantime, Lebanon continues to sweep-up reputed Israeli assets spying on Hezbollah. Over the weekend, came reports that the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was looking to replace Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad foreign intelligence agency, rather than extend his term after eight years.
David Ben-Gurion established the Israel Secret Intelligence Service (its current name) in 1951 and made it directly accountable to the Prime Minister's Office. The Mossad solidified its international reputation for spycraft when in 1956 it obtained Khrushchev's Secret Speech signaling a repudiation of Stalinism. In 1961 the Mossad alerted French president Charles de Gaulle of a plot against his life thereby crucially strengthening Franco-Israeli relations.
Until recently admiration for Dagan, in the afterglow of the elimination of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mughniyeh and the purported stalling of Iran's dash for nuclear weapons, outweighed disapproval over his management style. In any event, Dagan is hardly the first Mossad chief to face criticism.
The Mossad has, in fact, historically been a lightning rod for condemnation. Even the decisions of the legendary Isser Harel, the Mossad's longest serving chief, drew -- comparatively mild by today's standards -- UN condemnation after the agency abducted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires to face justice in Jerusalem. Or take Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor, undoubtedly facilitated by Mossad intelligence, which was unanimously condemned by the UN Security Council. The Mossad's capture in London of the Israeli renegade nuclear worker Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 likely provoked a General Assembly resolution denouncing Israel's purported nuclear capacity. The 1988 assassination of Fatah co-founder Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad) in Tunis as he was laying the groundwork for the first intifada generated a strong denunciation from the UN Security Council. And in 1997, after a spate of suicide bombings in Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, serving his first term as premier, ordered the Mossad to retaliate against Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal then based in Amman. But the mission to poison Mashaal ended in ignominious failure when two members of the Mossad team were captured. Under intense US pressure Israel was forced to provide Jordan with the antidote and release Hamas prisoners.
Invariably, when the Mossad becomes involved the stakes are already high. Its primary mission today is to block Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and to conduct counter-terror operations. Because of the nature of its work, its successes tend to remain hidden while its failures are often magnified. Speaking at a gathering for current and former Mossad operatives this week, Dagan was still standing and full of praise for his operatives as was President Shimon Peres who remarked that the Mossad’s reputation in the global intelligence community was undiminished.
John Le Carre, for all his moral relativism, may have been on to something when he had the anti-hero of his espionage classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy remark that you can tell the soul of a nation from its intelligence service. What can one discern about Israel's soul from the operations of the Mossad? That the Jewish state lives on a practically constant war-footing facing existential danger is obvious. What stands out is that Israel's quest for security is inextricably linked with a yearning to create conditions conducive for a secure peace. It is not incidental that the Mossad's logo contains – not a hawk or eagle – but a dove.
-- June 2010
David Ben-Gurion established the Israel Secret Intelligence Service (its current name) in 1951 and made it directly accountable to the Prime Minister's Office. The Mossad solidified its international reputation for spycraft when in 1956 it obtained Khrushchev's Secret Speech signaling a repudiation of Stalinism. In 1961 the Mossad alerted French president Charles de Gaulle of a plot against his life thereby crucially strengthening Franco-Israeli relations.
Until recently admiration for Dagan, in the afterglow of the elimination of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mughniyeh and the purported stalling of Iran's dash for nuclear weapons, outweighed disapproval over his management style. In any event, Dagan is hardly the first Mossad chief to face criticism.
The Mossad has, in fact, historically been a lightning rod for condemnation. Even the decisions of the legendary Isser Harel, the Mossad's longest serving chief, drew -- comparatively mild by today's standards -- UN condemnation after the agency abducted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires to face justice in Jerusalem. Or take Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor, undoubtedly facilitated by Mossad intelligence, which was unanimously condemned by the UN Security Council. The Mossad's capture in London of the Israeli renegade nuclear worker Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 likely provoked a General Assembly resolution denouncing Israel's purported nuclear capacity. The 1988 assassination of Fatah co-founder Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad) in Tunis as he was laying the groundwork for the first intifada generated a strong denunciation from the UN Security Council. And in 1997, after a spate of suicide bombings in Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, serving his first term as premier, ordered the Mossad to retaliate against Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal then based in Amman. But the mission to poison Mashaal ended in ignominious failure when two members of the Mossad team were captured. Under intense US pressure Israel was forced to provide Jordan with the antidote and release Hamas prisoners.
Invariably, when the Mossad becomes involved the stakes are already high. Its primary mission today is to block Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and to conduct counter-terror operations. Because of the nature of its work, its successes tend to remain hidden while its failures are often magnified. Speaking at a gathering for current and former Mossad operatives this week, Dagan was still standing and full of praise for his operatives as was President Shimon Peres who remarked that the Mossad’s reputation in the global intelligence community was undiminished.
John Le Carre, for all his moral relativism, may have been on to something when he had the anti-hero of his espionage classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy remark that you can tell the soul of a nation from its intelligence service. What can one discern about Israel's soul from the operations of the Mossad? That the Jewish state lives on a practically constant war-footing facing existential danger is obvious. What stands out is that Israel's quest for security is inextricably linked with a yearning to create conditions conducive for a secure peace. It is not incidental that the Mossad's logo contains – not a hawk or eagle – but a dove.
-- June 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Gaza's isolation
On Monday, European Foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg heard Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy czar, argue that Gaza's "dangerous isolation" had to end. The 27-nation union agreed that Israel's blockade of the Hamas-governed enclave was "unsustainable" and "politically counterproductive."
In the aftermath of the failed May 31st attempt by a Turkish flotilla to defy Israel's maritime quarantine of the Strip, and the ensuing deaths of nine Turkish mercenaries on board, Jerusalem has come under withering pressure to abandon its policy of strictly limiting the type of non-humanitarian commodities allowed into the Strip.
The EU ministers want daily life for the people of Gaza to return to normal and for Israel to relate to Gaza as if Hamas were not ruling the enclave. To that end, the ministers demanded the unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of goods and persons to and from the Strip. No claim of a humanitarian crisis was made, so what appears to be "unsustainable" in Europe's mind is the continued lack of normalcy. The ministers did not relate to the consequences normalization might have on strengthening Hamas's rule. Instead, they obliquely called for "Palestinian reconciliation behind President Mahmoud Abbas."
After Hamas defeated Fatah in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, the Quartet – the EU, US, Russia and the UN – laid down conditions Hamas needed to meet to be accepted by the civilized world: a commitment to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous Palestinian obligations. Nevertheless, several EU countries have been discreetly talking to Hamas; Russia has been doing so openly, and Hamas claims it has even had indirect contact with the Obama administration.
For Europe, isolating Gaza is "politically counterproductive" in the sense that some EU members presumably prefer the path of least resistance and are willing to accept Hamas as a fait accompli. Some see dealing with Hamas as potentially facilitating Palestinian reconciliation. And some may hope that engaging Hamas might help moderate its policies.
In fact, the path of least resistance is paved with perilous consequences. The surest indicator Hamas has no interest in moderating its opposition on peace is its rejection of the Quartet's conditions in the first place. And as for promoting Palestinian reconciliation, Fatah has made it plain that the international flirtation with Hamas is unhelpful.
Far from the continued isolation of Gaza being "dangerous," insisting on normalcy under current conditions is untenable. First, it would legitimize and solidify Hamas's suzerainty over the Gaza Strip, institutionalizing a destabilizing, intransigent and obsessively anti-Israel Iranian-backed satellite situated a short drive from metropolitan Tel Aviv. Second, it could set the stage for Hamas's complete takeover of a still under-developed Palestinian polity, dislodging the comparatively moderate Fatah government now in the West Bank. (Indeed, this week's visit to Gaza by Arab League chief Amr Moussa was viewed with consternation by Fatah officials in Ramallah.) Third, and massively important to the West, it could undermine the stability of Egypt – just over the Gaza border -- by providing an infusion of energy and succor to Hamas's beleaguered parent-body, the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Gaza blockade is too often portrayed as an arbitrary exercise in Israeli power. History argues otherwise. Ariel Sharon's government, finding no Palestinian peace partner, unilaterally disengaged from Gaza in the summer of 2005 thus presenting the Palestinians with the opportunity to create a Singapore on the Mediterranean. In January 2006, however, Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian elections. Within six months, Gaza gunmen raided Israel killing two IDF soldiers and capturing Gilad Schalit. Israel also came under accelerated bombardment from Gaza. All the while, Arab states sought -- and failed-- to heal the Fatah-Hamas rift. Instead, Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza in an orgy of violence. To halt the onslaught of rockets that had traumatized Sderot, Ehud Olmert was obliged to launch Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009). That unfairly-maligned military campaign has mostly deterred further Hamas aggression.
If The New York Times is correct that Israel's efforts to weaken Hamas and drive it from power have failed, it is precisely because the international community has worked so diligently to undermine Israel's labors. The Economist complains that Israel's policy of isolation is responsible for the fact that the Islamists are creating a Gaza in their own image. But precipitously opening up Gaza now would more likely spread the Islamist toxin to the West Bank than relative Fatah moderation to Gaza.
With the Quartet and EU apparently poised to buckle, Hamas is already relishing an end to the blockade. Yet officials in Israel maintain that Hamas is in fact on the brink of political and economic collapse; its popularity among Palestinians faltering. According to a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll released Tuesday, if presidential elections were held today, Abbas would defeat Hamas premier Ismail Haniyeh 54 percent to 39%.
In short, contrary to accepted wisdom, the blockade may well be working.
Israelis are aware that Europeans unfairly view them as paranoid – supposedly suffering from a "siege mentality." Yet a devil-may-care approach to ending Gaza's isolation could permanently implant an empowered Hamas to menace not just the Jewish state and moderate Arabs, but to challenge Western interests for years to come.
-- June 2010
In the aftermath of the failed May 31st attempt by a Turkish flotilla to defy Israel's maritime quarantine of the Strip, and the ensuing deaths of nine Turkish mercenaries on board, Jerusalem has come under withering pressure to abandon its policy of strictly limiting the type of non-humanitarian commodities allowed into the Strip.
The EU ministers want daily life for the people of Gaza to return to normal and for Israel to relate to Gaza as if Hamas were not ruling the enclave. To that end, the ministers demanded the unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of goods and persons to and from the Strip. No claim of a humanitarian crisis was made, so what appears to be "unsustainable" in Europe's mind is the continued lack of normalcy. The ministers did not relate to the consequences normalization might have on strengthening Hamas's rule. Instead, they obliquely called for "Palestinian reconciliation behind President Mahmoud Abbas."
After Hamas defeated Fatah in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, the Quartet – the EU, US, Russia and the UN – laid down conditions Hamas needed to meet to be accepted by the civilized world: a commitment to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous Palestinian obligations. Nevertheless, several EU countries have been discreetly talking to Hamas; Russia has been doing so openly, and Hamas claims it has even had indirect contact with the Obama administration.
For Europe, isolating Gaza is "politically counterproductive" in the sense that some EU members presumably prefer the path of least resistance and are willing to accept Hamas as a fait accompli. Some see dealing with Hamas as potentially facilitating Palestinian reconciliation. And some may hope that engaging Hamas might help moderate its policies.
In fact, the path of least resistance is paved with perilous consequences. The surest indicator Hamas has no interest in moderating its opposition on peace is its rejection of the Quartet's conditions in the first place. And as for promoting Palestinian reconciliation, Fatah has made it plain that the international flirtation with Hamas is unhelpful.
Far from the continued isolation of Gaza being "dangerous," insisting on normalcy under current conditions is untenable. First, it would legitimize and solidify Hamas's suzerainty over the Gaza Strip, institutionalizing a destabilizing, intransigent and obsessively anti-Israel Iranian-backed satellite situated a short drive from metropolitan Tel Aviv. Second, it could set the stage for Hamas's complete takeover of a still under-developed Palestinian polity, dislodging the comparatively moderate Fatah government now in the West Bank. (Indeed, this week's visit to Gaza by Arab League chief Amr Moussa was viewed with consternation by Fatah officials in Ramallah.) Third, and massively important to the West, it could undermine the stability of Egypt – just over the Gaza border -- by providing an infusion of energy and succor to Hamas's beleaguered parent-body, the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Gaza blockade is too often portrayed as an arbitrary exercise in Israeli power. History argues otherwise. Ariel Sharon's government, finding no Palestinian peace partner, unilaterally disengaged from Gaza in the summer of 2005 thus presenting the Palestinians with the opportunity to create a Singapore on the Mediterranean. In January 2006, however, Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian elections. Within six months, Gaza gunmen raided Israel killing two IDF soldiers and capturing Gilad Schalit. Israel also came under accelerated bombardment from Gaza. All the while, Arab states sought -- and failed-- to heal the Fatah-Hamas rift. Instead, Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza in an orgy of violence. To halt the onslaught of rockets that had traumatized Sderot, Ehud Olmert was obliged to launch Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008-January 18, 2009). That unfairly-maligned military campaign has mostly deterred further Hamas aggression.
If The New York Times is correct that Israel's efforts to weaken Hamas and drive it from power have failed, it is precisely because the international community has worked so diligently to undermine Israel's labors. The Economist complains that Israel's policy of isolation is responsible for the fact that the Islamists are creating a Gaza in their own image. But precipitously opening up Gaza now would more likely spread the Islamist toxin to the West Bank than relative Fatah moderation to Gaza.
With the Quartet and EU apparently poised to buckle, Hamas is already relishing an end to the blockade. Yet officials in Israel maintain that Hamas is in fact on the brink of political and economic collapse; its popularity among Palestinians faltering. According to a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll released Tuesday, if presidential elections were held today, Abbas would defeat Hamas premier Ismail Haniyeh 54 percent to 39%.
In short, contrary to accepted wisdom, the blockade may well be working.
Israelis are aware that Europeans unfairly view them as paranoid – supposedly suffering from a "siege mentality." Yet a devil-may-care approach to ending Gaza's isolation could permanently implant an empowered Hamas to menace not just the Jewish state and moderate Arabs, but to challenge Western interests for years to come.
-- June 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Turkey & Israel
Incident foretold - The developing diplomatic and media reaction to Israel's interdiction Monday of a pro-Palestinian flotilla steaming toward the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip speaks volumes: about Israel's deepening isolation in the world and the perverted moral priorities of the international community.
Even before Defense Minister Ehud Barak presented Israel's preliminary report at a 1 p.m. Tel Aviv news conference the censorious deluge had begun. The European Union called for an end to the quarantine of Gaza; Greece cancelled a scheduled visit by the commander of the Israeli Air Force; France unleashed a stinging denunciation; Switzerland called in the Israeli ambassador. A morning anchor on Britain's Sky News demanded an Israeli spokesman tell him why Israel had no respect for international law. Not one satellite news channel in the region carried Barak's English-language briefing. Only a few bothered to broadcast an earlier statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
As soon as operational conditions permitted, Jerusalem wasted no time in presenting its case, but what it said was promptly ignored, denigrated or dismissed.
These basic facts were known early on:
• Organizers: The flotilla was instigated by the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, an extremist Islamist organization based in Turkey in collaboration with the violence-prone International Solidarity Movement. Their moves were coordinated with Turkey and Hamas.
• Aid was a pretext: Organizers were offered the opportunity to ship any humanitarian supplies to Gaza via the Israeli port of Ashdod; a million tons of humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza from Israel over the last 18 months. They refused.
• Propaganda was the aim: IHH was repeatedly warned that under no circumstances would its convoy be permitted to sail into Gaza. Only when last-minute sea-to-sea warnings to desist were ignored were the vessels boarded by Israeli navy commandos. There was minimal resistance on five of the six boats as the troops, equipped with anti-riot gear, came aboard.
• Violence was premeditated: Instead of encountering "peace activists" the commandos rappelling down from helicopters onto the largest boat – the multi- story ocean liner Mavi Marmara with hundreds of militants aboard -- were set upon by crowds armed with knives, metal bars, and Molotov cocktails. At least two commandos are in hospital with gunshot wounds; another has a fractured skull. The commandos radioed that they feared being overwhelmed and lynched (video) and were given permission to use live fire. These are the circumstances – self-defense – in which 9 pro-Palestinian activists, mostly Turkish nationals, were killed.
Nevertheless, Israel confronts a media intifada in which rage replaces rationality. From the outset, Arab news outlets and their enablers, stoked anti-Israel sentiment with bogus claims disseminated by new media technologies that 20 "activists" had been wantonly slaughtered, and that the Islamic Movement's northern branch chief Raed Salah (an Islamist agitator who carries an Israeli passport and was on board the Mavi Marmara) had been "assassinated." He is alive and well.
Arab leaders in Israel have called for raucous a general strike; Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad has urged Hamas to put aside its differences with Fatah in the common struggle against Israel. Radicalized Turkey, now allied with Iran and Hamas, may have found a pretext for a formal break in diplomatic ties with Israel.
Liberal Europe has trotted out the usual litany of charges. Israel is accused of violating international law, notwithstanding that it is legally entitled to quarantine Hamas which has declared war on Israel. The Jewish state is excoriated for acting on the high-seas, though that's where the unlawful intent of the flotilla could best be preempted. It is criticized for disproportionate use of force, though its soldiers met with lethal opposition. In practice, any steps Israel takes in self-defense are adjudged "disproportionate."
In many ways, Monday's dawn clash off the Israeli coast was an incident foretold. At the UN, U.S. diplomats blocked a completely one-sided formal Security Council resolution condemning Israel that had demanded a Goldstone-like commission of inquiry. Instead, they tiredly acquiesced to a less equivocal censure which calls for an "impartial investigation." Yet this is an administration that prides itself on "never letting a serious crisis go to waste." It is, therefore, not too late for President Barack Obama to lead the civilized word out of its moral stupor; to emphatically declare that the season for shameless scapegoating of the Jewish state is over; to assert that Israel is in the forefront of a struggle against Western civilization by insidious Islamist fanaticism.
June 2010
Even before Defense Minister Ehud Barak presented Israel's preliminary report at a 1 p.m. Tel Aviv news conference the censorious deluge had begun. The European Union called for an end to the quarantine of Gaza; Greece cancelled a scheduled visit by the commander of the Israeli Air Force; France unleashed a stinging denunciation; Switzerland called in the Israeli ambassador. A morning anchor on Britain's Sky News demanded an Israeli spokesman tell him why Israel had no respect for international law. Not one satellite news channel in the region carried Barak's English-language briefing. Only a few bothered to broadcast an earlier statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
As soon as operational conditions permitted, Jerusalem wasted no time in presenting its case, but what it said was promptly ignored, denigrated or dismissed.
These basic facts were known early on:
• Organizers: The flotilla was instigated by the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, an extremist Islamist organization based in Turkey in collaboration with the violence-prone International Solidarity Movement. Their moves were coordinated with Turkey and Hamas.
• Aid was a pretext: Organizers were offered the opportunity to ship any humanitarian supplies to Gaza via the Israeli port of Ashdod; a million tons of humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza from Israel over the last 18 months. They refused.
• Propaganda was the aim: IHH was repeatedly warned that under no circumstances would its convoy be permitted to sail into Gaza. Only when last-minute sea-to-sea warnings to desist were ignored were the vessels boarded by Israeli navy commandos. There was minimal resistance on five of the six boats as the troops, equipped with anti-riot gear, came aboard.
• Violence was premeditated: Instead of encountering "peace activists" the commandos rappelling down from helicopters onto the largest boat – the multi- story ocean liner Mavi Marmara with hundreds of militants aboard -- were set upon by crowds armed with knives, metal bars, and Molotov cocktails. At least two commandos are in hospital with gunshot wounds; another has a fractured skull. The commandos radioed that they feared being overwhelmed and lynched (video) and were given permission to use live fire. These are the circumstances – self-defense – in which 9 pro-Palestinian activists, mostly Turkish nationals, were killed.
Nevertheless, Israel confronts a media intifada in which rage replaces rationality. From the outset, Arab news outlets and their enablers, stoked anti-Israel sentiment with bogus claims disseminated by new media technologies that 20 "activists" had been wantonly slaughtered, and that the Islamic Movement's northern branch chief Raed Salah (an Islamist agitator who carries an Israeli passport and was on board the Mavi Marmara) had been "assassinated." He is alive and well.
Arab leaders in Israel have called for raucous a general strike; Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad has urged Hamas to put aside its differences with Fatah in the common struggle against Israel. Radicalized Turkey, now allied with Iran and Hamas, may have found a pretext for a formal break in diplomatic ties with Israel.
Liberal Europe has trotted out the usual litany of charges. Israel is accused of violating international law, notwithstanding that it is legally entitled to quarantine Hamas which has declared war on Israel. The Jewish state is excoriated for acting on the high-seas, though that's where the unlawful intent of the flotilla could best be preempted. It is criticized for disproportionate use of force, though its soldiers met with lethal opposition. In practice, any steps Israel takes in self-defense are adjudged "disproportionate."
In many ways, Monday's dawn clash off the Israeli coast was an incident foretold. At the UN, U.S. diplomats blocked a completely one-sided formal Security Council resolution condemning Israel that had demanded a Goldstone-like commission of inquiry. Instead, they tiredly acquiesced to a less equivocal censure which calls for an "impartial investigation." Yet this is an administration that prides itself on "never letting a serious crisis go to waste." It is, therefore, not too late for President Barack Obama to lead the civilized word out of its moral stupor; to emphatically declare that the season for shameless scapegoating of the Jewish state is over; to assert that Israel is in the forefront of a struggle against Western civilization by insidious Islamist fanaticism.
June 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Israeli Nukes
Speaking before throngs of supporters in a Prague square on April 5, 2009, President Barack Obama declared America's commitment to a world without nuclear weapons, while acknowledging that the goal might not be reached in his lifetime. With this as an apparent impetus, the Arab world has pressed for greater international attention on Israel's nuclear activities. It did so at a Washington conference devoted to keeping nuclear materials out of terrorist hands, and at a review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at UN headquarters in New York. Under Arab prodding, the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the US, issued a statement -- in effect aimed at Israel – calling for a nuclear-free Middle East. In this way, irresolute international efforts to block Iran from building nuclear weapons have been further sidetracked to make Israel the issue. The Arabs are also lobbying to put Israel on the agenda when the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meets next month in Vienna. IAEA chief Yukiya Amano has reportedly invited the world's foreign ministers to offer suggestions on how to bring Israel into the NPT regime. The agency could also decide to appoint a rapporteur whose mission would be to keep Israel's nuclear program in the international spotlight.
What is Israel's nuclear posture? The Jewish state insists it will not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the region. Its leaders have signaled, however, that the country has a "bomb in the basement" to be used in the last resort should the Third Commonwealth be about to fall. This policy of nuclear ambiguity is now being frontally challenged.
Israeli doves historically argued that Israel's presumed nuclear capacity had already forced the Arabs to come to terms with the permanence of the Jewish state; it also obviated the need for strategic territorial depth, making a withdrawal to roughly the 1967 boundaries a viable option. Today, paradoxically, Israel is being pressed to go ahead with the withdrawal, abjure nuclear deterrence, and reconcile to the fact that even its most moderate Arab interlocutors do not accept the legitimacy a Jewish state.
Is it, nevertheless, time to jettison nuclear ambiguity? Some strategists including former Knesset member Uzi Even believe ambiguity has runs its course and that IAEA inspections of the Dimona reactor would -- at this point -- do no harm to Israeli security. The more prevalent view is that with Iran on the cusp of a bomb, an abrupt, forced, abandonment of nuclear ambiguity could make deterrence less credible and the region less stable. Emily Landau, for instance, argues that abandoning ambiguity in the present environment would intensify pressure to disarm entirely.
Yet why not discard the nuclear option altogether? Because Israel continues to face existential threats. Israeli policymakers would doubtlessly welcome seeing the region transformed into a zone free of all WMDs – including chemical and biological arms – and also seeing conventional forces considerably reduced. This goal, however, would need to be achieved in the context of a freely arrived at and comprehensive peace settlement. The first imperative toward creating an environment conducive to a peaceful tolerant Middle East is removing the risk that the dark, bellicose and fanatical leaders of Iran will wield atomic weapons.
The immediate question is: How vigorously are civilized countries prepared to defend the arms-reduction and non-proliferation agenda from those who would cynically manipulate the cause of disarmament in pursuit of their myopic vendetta against Israel?
--May 2010
What is Israel's nuclear posture? The Jewish state insists it will not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the region. Its leaders have signaled, however, that the country has a "bomb in the basement" to be used in the last resort should the Third Commonwealth be about to fall. This policy of nuclear ambiguity is now being frontally challenged.
Israeli doves historically argued that Israel's presumed nuclear capacity had already forced the Arabs to come to terms with the permanence of the Jewish state; it also obviated the need for strategic territorial depth, making a withdrawal to roughly the 1967 boundaries a viable option. Today, paradoxically, Israel is being pressed to go ahead with the withdrawal, abjure nuclear deterrence, and reconcile to the fact that even its most moderate Arab interlocutors do not accept the legitimacy a Jewish state.
Is it, nevertheless, time to jettison nuclear ambiguity? Some strategists including former Knesset member Uzi Even believe ambiguity has runs its course and that IAEA inspections of the Dimona reactor would -- at this point -- do no harm to Israeli security. The more prevalent view is that with Iran on the cusp of a bomb, an abrupt, forced, abandonment of nuclear ambiguity could make deterrence less credible and the region less stable. Emily Landau, for instance, argues that abandoning ambiguity in the present environment would intensify pressure to disarm entirely.
Yet why not discard the nuclear option altogether? Because Israel continues to face existential threats. Israeli policymakers would doubtlessly welcome seeing the region transformed into a zone free of all WMDs – including chemical and biological arms – and also seeing conventional forces considerably reduced. This goal, however, would need to be achieved in the context of a freely arrived at and comprehensive peace settlement. The first imperative toward creating an environment conducive to a peaceful tolerant Middle East is removing the risk that the dark, bellicose and fanatical leaders of Iran will wield atomic weapons.
The immediate question is: How vigorously are civilized countries prepared to defend the arms-reduction and non-proliferation agenda from those who would cynically manipulate the cause of disarmament in pursuit of their myopic vendetta against Israel?
--May 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Japan & Israel
Shalom Japan
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is in Tokyo this week for meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. Lieberman wants more robust Japanese pressure on Tehran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. His arrival follows a visit only last month by deputy premier Dan Meridor, who is responsible for intelligence matters.
Japan continues to dialogue with Iran and has emphasized that any resolution of the Iranian nuclear conundrum must be diplomatic. In a recent telephone conversation with his Iranian counterpart, Okada urged the Islamic Republic to honor UN Security Council Resolutions by ending uranium enrichment.
Lieberman's other main goal will be strengthening economic ties between Israel and Japan. The two countries established diplomatic relations in 1952. Only in recent years have visits exchanged by high-ranking officials become routine. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords and the weakening of the Arab boycott, economic ties between Israel and Japan have blossomed. Tokyo has backed Israel's pending admission, this year, into the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in the face of strenuous opposition by the Palestinian lobby. Israel does $3.4 billion of business a year with Japan, the country's second biggest East Asian trading partner behind China. By contrast, Japanese trade with Iran, mostly crude oil, stands at about $14 billion a year.
Japan's attitude toward the Palestinian-Israel conflict parallels those of EU countries sympathetic toward Israel. Tokyo condemned a recent rocket attack from Gaza which claimed the life of a foreign worker from Thailand. More categorically, however, it "deplored" Israeli housing construction plans over the Green Line. And like the EU, Japan has funneled millions of aid dollars to the Palestinian Authority.
One of Israel's leading Japan experts, Hebrew University professor Ben-Ami Shillony, has speculated that the new Hatoyama administration would take a more pro-Arab stance, perhaps going so far as to recognize Hamas. To date, however, Japan has taken its lead from the Obama administration regarding the Islamists. Sentiment among the Japanese intelligentsia also mimics European thinking. The country's largest conservative newspaper, Yomiuri recently sympathized with the Arab claim that it was hypocritical to focus on Iran's nuclear program when Israel remains a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Likewise, Japanese newspapers have urged Hamas to end its "resistance" while calling for greater flexibility from Israel.
Culturally, anti-Jewish sentiment has coexisted with philo-Semitism in the popular Japanese imagination. Some trace this phenomenon to a 19th century Scottish missionary who promulgated the notion that the Japanese were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. After WWI, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery made its way to Japan further bewildering a society that had little exposure to Jewish civilization. Its World War II alliance with Berlin notwithstanding, Japan did not pursue Nazi-like policies toward Jews who came under its power.
Would greater people-to-people contact benefit mutual understanding? The Israeli pop group Hadag Nachash was warmly welcomes in Japan last year. Increasing numbers of Japanese tourists, including Christian Zionists, have been visiting Israel. Tourism is hampered, however, by the absence of direct flights between the countries. The Japanese embassy in Tel Aviv is working with East Asian Studies majors at Jerusalem's Hebrew University to introduce Japanese society to Israeli high-school students. The need for a parallel program in Japan is probably no less great.
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is in Tokyo this week for meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada. Lieberman wants more robust Japanese pressure on Tehran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. His arrival follows a visit only last month by deputy premier Dan Meridor, who is responsible for intelligence matters.
Japan continues to dialogue with Iran and has emphasized that any resolution of the Iranian nuclear conundrum must be diplomatic. In a recent telephone conversation with his Iranian counterpart, Okada urged the Islamic Republic to honor UN Security Council Resolutions by ending uranium enrichment.
Lieberman's other main goal will be strengthening economic ties between Israel and Japan. The two countries established diplomatic relations in 1952. Only in recent years have visits exchanged by high-ranking officials become routine. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords and the weakening of the Arab boycott, economic ties between Israel and Japan have blossomed. Tokyo has backed Israel's pending admission, this year, into the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in the face of strenuous opposition by the Palestinian lobby. Israel does $3.4 billion of business a year with Japan, the country's second biggest East Asian trading partner behind China. By contrast, Japanese trade with Iran, mostly crude oil, stands at about $14 billion a year.
Japan's attitude toward the Palestinian-Israel conflict parallels those of EU countries sympathetic toward Israel. Tokyo condemned a recent rocket attack from Gaza which claimed the life of a foreign worker from Thailand. More categorically, however, it "deplored" Israeli housing construction plans over the Green Line. And like the EU, Japan has funneled millions of aid dollars to the Palestinian Authority.
One of Israel's leading Japan experts, Hebrew University professor Ben-Ami Shillony, has speculated that the new Hatoyama administration would take a more pro-Arab stance, perhaps going so far as to recognize Hamas. To date, however, Japan has taken its lead from the Obama administration regarding the Islamists. Sentiment among the Japanese intelligentsia also mimics European thinking. The country's largest conservative newspaper, Yomiuri recently sympathized with the Arab claim that it was hypocritical to focus on Iran's nuclear program when Israel remains a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Likewise, Japanese newspapers have urged Hamas to end its "resistance" while calling for greater flexibility from Israel.
Culturally, anti-Jewish sentiment has coexisted with philo-Semitism in the popular Japanese imagination. Some trace this phenomenon to a 19th century Scottish missionary who promulgated the notion that the Japanese were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. After WWI, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery made its way to Japan further bewildering a society that had little exposure to Jewish civilization. Its World War II alliance with Berlin notwithstanding, Japan did not pursue Nazi-like policies toward Jews who came under its power.
Would greater people-to-people contact benefit mutual understanding? The Israeli pop group Hadag Nachash was warmly welcomes in Japan last year. Increasing numbers of Japanese tourists, including Christian Zionists, have been visiting Israel. Tourism is hampered, however, by the absence of direct flights between the countries. The Japanese embassy in Tel Aviv is working with East Asian Studies majors at Jerusalem's Hebrew University to introduce Japanese society to Israeli high-school students. The need for a parallel program in Japan is probably no less great.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)